


Risen From Ruins

by Suaine



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: All Magic Comes With a Price, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Tower References, Derry (Stephen King) is Terrible, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Needs A Hug, Fix-It, Idiots in Love, It's turtles all the way down, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Resurrection, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Richie believes in magic, Temporary Character Death, Unbury Your Gays, beam guardians are people too, discussion of suicide, eddie kaspbrak comes home the long way round
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2020-11-08 06:03:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20830601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suaine/pseuds/Suaine
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak died and Richie Tozier is not dealing well. Richie stays in Derry with unfinished business: he can't just leave Eddie in the sewers.Magic is still very real in Derry, and death isn't always final. But there is a price for miracles.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I read Stephen King's It when I was eleven or twelve, and I felt for the young Losers and their struggle. I'm now 35, just old enough to feel kin to the old Losers. It: Chapter Two did things to me I didn't expect, and I can't stop turning it over and over in my mind. The way the horror is really the trauma we take with us, and how we can overcome it. The visceral horror of queer pain that's threaded through all of it. Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak deserve a chance, and fandom is the age-old tradition of taking a cue and running with it so far and fast you outrun the monsters chasing after you.
> 
> This fic is entirely canon compliant as these things go: canon is many things and there are other worlds than these. The things that happened in Chapter Two really happened, but let's not let that stop us, eh?
> 
> Take it from the man himself: the magic exists.

+

_But you know what they say about Derry: No one who dies here ever really dies._

+

This is how his world ends.

A bad joke and Richie’s tormented face. Richie’s voice.

Richie is alive, and Eddie is dying, and in that moment it feels like a worthy trade. Eddie wouldn’t know how to live in a world without Richie, not after they finally remembered their friendship, the way everything in his life had always been better with Richie around.

He can’t see his friends as they finally, righteously advance on the terror of their childhood, the creature that had not just hurt and killed people they loved, but somehow haunted their lives for the last twenty seven years. He feels relief and a wellspring of deep, terrible sadness.

In the end, Eddie Kaspbrak realizes that he’s not done. He’s unfinished. He’s not ready to go.

He can’t move and the pain is going away; everything is very dark now. The Loser’s voices are almost too quiet to make out and Eddie knows he’ll be gone before they’re done with It.

“Richie,” he tries to say, and it’s a thready whisper, a quiet, raspy cough of a word. “Richie, I…”

Richie and the others can’t hear him and Eddie feels waves of fear and sorrow wash over him. He’s not ready. He doesn’t want to go. Not yet. Not for a long time yet.

The darkness takes him with the last beating of a very old creature’s very small heart.

+


	2. Richie Stays Around

Bill is actually the first to leave, promising to keep in touch, but eager to get home to patch things up with his wife. The thing that had been lurking in a corner of his heart is finally gone, not the monster, but the tiny sliver of doubt, of a love lost in time. He’s free of it now and he smiles at Bev and Ben with genuine and all-encompassing affection. He’s glad for them, so glad. He kisses them both on the cheek as they say goodbye in the Derry Townhouse.

There are more hugs than anyone knows what to do with, covering for the reluctance they all feel at letting go. Bill is going alone and they’re all a little bit afraid that the forgetting wasn’t It’s doing at all, but an older, nastier magic of growing old and leaving home.

“I’ll call you guys when I get in, I promise.” Bill touches Mike’s shoulder. “I’ll need a couple of days to talk things over with Audra, but you’re always welcome to stay with us.”

More hugs fill their aching silence, the fact that only the five of them are here weighs heavy on the farewell. There’s an amount of pressure to actually be well, because your friends need you to be well.

Ben takes Beverly home that afternoon. She’ll be safe there, and cherished. Mike smiles at them as they leave, but Richie frowns, poking at the ball of resentful jealousy in the pit of his stomach. He hugs them both harder than he intends, whispering in both their ears to watch out for each other. Don’t let anything fuck this up.

Not like him. He takes Ben aside, just for a moment. “Make sure nothing bad ever happens to her again, if it’s the last thing you do.” Because if you fail, if you fail… Richie can’t say it, but the grief must be visible on his face, because Ben wraps him in a hug so tight, it takes Richie’s breath away. Or maybe that’s the sobs. Could be both.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Ben says, quietly, but with conviction. Richie pushes him away and makes a bad joke because bad jokes are easier than emotions or the truth. The truth is that Richie lost his chance forever, he kept his secret and now it’s too late. Too late to fix anything.

Then it’s just Mike and him at Mike’s place because neither of them want to be alone. Mike sends him worried glances all through dinner and works up the courage to ask by the time they settle down to watch some idle TV. “You’re not leaving, are you?” Richie carefully doesn’t look at him.

“Nah, I still have some shit I need to take care of.”

Mike sighs. “Derry is a dangerous place and I don’t think all of that was It’s doing. The magic here is real, and it’s never been benign.”

Richie shrugs. What else can Derry do to him now? He’s a man who has nothing left to lose. “I think I can take a bit of weirdness after the last few days.” After the last twenty seven years. “I’ll be okay. I just need to get my head on straight.” He laughs, a little hysterically.

Mike puts a hand on his arm. It’s meant to be soothing but Richie shakes it off. “C’mon, Mikey. It’s a funny joke. Haha, tragic queer needs to straighten out. Film at eleven.”

Mike looks at him deadpan for an uncomfortable minute, and then says: “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Riche grins. “My god, you do have a sense of humor. I was worried this town sucked it all out of you.”

Mike grins, too. “It sure as hell tried, but I’m a tough bastard.”

As the night wears on, Richie loses what concentration he had and drifts into an uneasy sleep right there on the couch. He dreams about Eddie. In the dream, Eddie is alive and angry. They fight physically and with words, both nasty and breaking all the rules. Richie is spread out on the ground, Eddie on top of him, and if this were a different kind of dream, things might get heated rather quickly. But this is the kind of dream woven from recrimination and lost chances.

“You just left me there, you asshole,” Eddie hisses as he aims to punch Richie in the face.

The words hurt worse than the fist. Richie sucks in a breath. Around them it feels like the creature’s lair, but looks somehow like their old clubhouse, and Richie’s heart breaks several times over. “I didn’t want that,” he says, but his voice cracks like the boulders that crushed the lair and Eddie’s body.

Eddie leans down, his eyes tearful and so bright with anger and betrayal that Richie has to look away. “I would have stayed, if it had been you. I would have dragged you out of hell.” Richie remembers the headspider and doesn’t mention that Eddie, too, has had his moments of cowardice. Because Eddie had been the bravest of them. It is much harder to be brave when you’re terrified of everything and Eddie did it anyway, always. Of course, he complained the entire way there, but he always stood at Richie’s side when it mattered.

Richie swallows down his tears. “I fucking wish it would have been me, okay? Is that what you want to hear? That this 40 year old washed up asshole would have died for you? Because it’s the goddamn truth but it doesn’t change a thing.”

The lights had given Beverly terrible visions of all their untimely demises, and maybe she had known exactly what would happen, was sure Eddie was dead because that’s where she’d seen him end. Richie only has a headache and a broken heart. For the entire time since he’s come back to Derry, he’s resented the fuck out of his old feelings. He’d missed Eddie his entire life without even knowing it, and now he can’t do anything with this fucking mountain of emotions, because Eddie’s gone ahead and fucking died.

Eddie is still on top of Richie, his face obscured now because all the fight had gone out of him and he’s dropped his forehead to rest on Richie’s shoulder. He’s shaking. “I didn’t even get to say it,” he says, voice rough and scratchy. “I made the worst possible joke because in the end, I was nothing but a coward.”

Richie frowns. Maybe he’d call Eddie a coward to rile him up, maybe in anger or fear, but in his own head? Never. Eddie Kaspbrak is not a coward. But before he can figure out what’s happening, the dream tears away from him at the sharp trill of Mike’s phone alarm. Richie looks around to find Mike scrambling for the thing, apologetic and fully dressed. There’s a suitcase near the door and the smell of coffee and bacon.

He wants to say: “Oh honey, you shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble.” But the joke remains unspoken as a nasty spike of fear burrows in his chest. He doesn’t want to be alone in Derry. It’s a good way to get yourself killed, monster or no.

“Richie, hey, sorry, didn’t want to wake you up just yet. I’m making breakfast.”

Richie pushes himself up off the couch, feeling like death and rot and all the things they found in the sewers. “Nah, man, I’m not really all that hungry.”

Mike pauses, a concerned look crossing his features, one he tries to hide. “You haven’t eaten much yesterday.”

Richie shudders. “Kind of hard to work up an appetite.” Eddie’s dead, what good’s a sandwich gonna do?

“You have to promise me that you’ll take care of yourself, buddy. I can’t go if you’re just going to commit slow suicide in this godforsaken town.” Mike, always the guy with the frank assessments. Richie could do with a little more subtlety right about now.

Truth is, he’s thought about it on and off all day yesterday, between the tearful goodbyes and the absence of Eddie that he could feel like a physical weight on his chest. But it’s not a solution to anything, he’s too fucking afraid of the uncertainty. Funny, because they have literally met a godlike creature, have seen ghosts and experienced the bond between their souls. They know - for a fact! - that there’s more to people than their bodies. Richie is still afraid. The universe is a very big place, and he is a very small creature in it. There are no guarantees.

“Jeez, Mike. I’ll be fine. I promise I won’t do anything that stupid.”

Mollified, Mike forces breakfast on him with a smile and gives him the keys to the rooms above the library. If he’s going to be staying any amount of time, he might as well crash in the lighthouse. Richie and Mike say their goodbyes before lunch and then Richie is alone with the ghosts of their childhoods.

+

Richie wanders the town aimlessly, trying to fit all of his scattered memories together. Not everything had come back at once and most of his memories include Eddie or the monster. He is trying to rebuild a life, reconstruct a person from the ruins of whatever It had done to them. The forgetting had been horrifyingly vast but also left them with no desire to find out anything about their pasts.

Curios, now, about who he might be with all of his pieces intact, Richie finds himself drifting toward the kissing bridge. Ah, yes. There’s a key part of his soul right there, and he isn’t ready to face either Eddie’s old house or his own, so the kissing bridge it is.

He walks up to the wooden panel where he’d carved his and Eddie’s initials, a statement of hope and intent back then, a memorial now, always a road untaken.

Richie feels cold steal over his skin that has nothing to do with the weather, and very little to do with monsters. The carving is still there, faded but unmistakable. R + E. Richie’s hands shake as he traces the letters. He’s never actually come out and said it. His friends know anyway, that he is - was - no, is terribly and hopelessly in love with Eddie Kaspbrak, and the twenty seven year amnesia hasn’t changed a thing about it. Neither has death, apparently, except that the pain is sharper now.

When Richie looks away from the letters, he notices a man standing beside the canal, and he can’t say what it is, but the guy looks distressed to the point of possibly doing stupid shit and a voice in his own head tells Richie to stop being a selfish prick and help this poor idiot before he jumps into this grey water infested river.

It sounds like Eddie, so Richie makes his way down to the banks.

The man’s hair is an unremarkable sandy blond and his leather jacket screams both lumberjack and Do Not Touch. As he turns to face Richie, he stiffens and goes into a defensive posture that also screams PTSD. Richie holds his hands up and makes himself as small as he can. “Hey,” he says, going with the most soothing voice in his repertoire. “You look like you need a little help. Anything I can do?”

Anger flares in the man’s eyes, and Richie takes a step back. When he speaks, it’s clear he’s been crying. “Oh, anything you can do? This town has damn well done enough.”

Richie drops his arms. “I’m with you on that one, buddy. I wouldn’t have come back here if I hadn’t made a promise to some very good friends.” Keep him talking, confuse the shit out of him, maybe that’ll stop him from going over the edge. Connect. Maybe that’ll help you, too.

The man’s eyes narrow. “You don’t know who I am.”

“Should I?” Richie starts to think back over the info Mike had given them, but it hadn’t exactly included an update on local celebrities.

The guy deflates, and something in Richie wants to reach out and give him a hug. “I’m Don Hagarty,” he says, pauses, as if to check for a reaction, but when the name doesn’t ring a bell with Richie, he continues. “I was Adrian Mellon’s fiance. Am his fiance. He was murdered a couple of weeks ago. This town was the death of him and it’s my fault for not insisting we leave earlier.”

Oh, oh god. Richie doesn’t know what to say. He has heard about Mellon, some part of him always kept up with queer news and this one hit home before he ever realized why. Adrian Mellon died in a horrific homophobic attack, something that was evil and disgusting before the monster ever took part in it. Though if Mike is to be believed, It certainly got its share of blood.

Richie’s knees buckle and he has to sit down, or he’s going to be the one falling into the river. “I’m… I’m so sorry. Fuck.”

Hagarty sits down next to him. His voice is flat when he speaks. “I’ve lived here all my life and I always knew I needed to get out, but Adrian, he liked this place. He always saw the good in it. Shit, he loved Derry more than most townies.”

Richie nods. “I moved away when I was a teen and I repressed most of my childhood.” Well, had it repressed by an evil monster clown, but same difference. Don sighs, throws a stone at the water. The current looks sluggish, but people have made that mistake before. The river is like the rest of Derry, it has teeth. 

“I’m leaving tonight, trying to salvage what I can from my life. I’m a twenty-seven year old software engineer, people say I have the world at my feet. All I wanted was a happy life marrying this idiot of a man, now I’ve got to figure out how to be myself again.”

Richie can’t look at him. A nasty part deep down wants to say that at least Don had had Adrian before he lost him, but that’s not fucking fair, not even a little. “The guy I’ve been in love with for most of my life died two days ago and I never told him.”

Don turns to look at Richie, disbelief and grief giving way to wary curiosity. “Who are you? Why am I even telling you any of this?”

Richie shrugs. “Hell if I know.” He thinks about Derry and whether it has any chance to become better than what it’s always been, now that the monster at its heart is dead. “I know you really want to leave, and hey, that’s fine. I can barely stand to be here myself. It’s a small town full of small minds. But I think maybe if Derry is ever going to change, maybe someone has to stay around and remind it. You know, be its better angels and all that.”

Incredulous, Don shakes his head. “You’ve got some nerve, Mister-”

Richie grins. “Tozier. Richie Tozier.”

“Tozier,” Don says, trying out the word as if he’s not heard it for the first time. “Wait, isn’t there a comedian-”

Richie puts a finger to his lips and hisses. “Shh, don’t say it.”

Don shakes his head. “Look, whatever you think you need to do, I need to be away from this place. Did you know that the year I was born, dozens of children were murdered, and people just fucking forgot?”

Richie tries really hard not to laugh hysterically. That would really put the breaks on this beautiful budding friendship.

“This town is going to take everything good in any of us and corrupt it until there’s nothing left.” Don gets up, and he doesn’t look like a ghost anymore. He looks like a man who wants to prove the haters wrong by living his best fucking life. “Good luck, Richie Tozier. Try not to get murdered while you’re saving them.”

Richie takes Don’s hand and shakes it, watches him go to make sure the moment is gone. He’s had moments like this and he’s glad it’s over because he’s just about run out of steam. A double suicide certainly would have been on brand for Derry, but Richie has other plans.

First off, he’s going to find Eddie.

+

Incidentally, Eddie is right there, watching.

Alongside him stands a massive, ancient turtle, made from ribbons of golden light. The turtle is ostensibly dead, in that it passed on beyond the veil, lost its body, returned from the veil to make sure to witness the passing of one of its brethren, and also not in any way allowed to interfere.

It is not exactly a god, but quite, quite powerful, and rules are made to be broken.

“Alright,” Eddie says, a little shaky from the feelings coursing through him. “What do I have to do?”

The turtle speaks and the sound booms through the world like a tunderclap. _ONLY THE OLDEST MAGIC CAN SAVE YOU NOW._

Eddie rubs his temple. “I know, you’ve said that, like, five times already.”

_IT’S UP TO HIM._

“Great,” Eddie says, half-jokingly, “so that means I’m doomed.”

The turtle only chuckles, a world-shaking sound that burrows deep into Eddie’s heart, where hope grows like a snowdrop in February.


	3. Arrested Development

Eddie wakes from his nightmare with a startled gasp. His hands fly to his chest, check for the wound he is sure is there, a tunnel of torn flesh ripped right through him. The monster has killed him. He knows it has.

There is no hole.

He feels rather more alive than he should, in his situation. This certainly isn’t heaven. He looks around and finds himself exactly where he left the scene, though the geography has changed. Rubble and big, angry boulders make up most of his surroundings. The fact he can see anything at all is peculiar, there shouldn’t be any light.

Eddie forces himself up and is half convinced that his chest will split open and all his guts will spill out. But there is no pain, no tearing, no discomfort. He feels light and unencumbered. His lungs have never been this free and that’s a depressing thought because he’s still pretty sure he’s dead and being the most free he’s ever been as a ghost? That’s one hell of an indictment of his life.

Crawling over the boulders toward the light seems like a perfectly good idea right until he actually finds it and recoils so hard he slips and lands on his ass. He’s seen people caught in the deadlights, both Richie and Beverly, and that’s not a sight he ever wants to repeat, but there’s a special horror in seeing something that looks, frankly, like Eddie’s twin, suspended in harsh, fallow light.

“Jesus,” Eddie hisses. His voice doesn’t echo, it sounds flat as a faded photograph. He crawls closer, very careful not to make any noise, though he realizes he needn’t have bothered. His shoe catches on a small stone and sort of passes through it, like pushing your hand through thick oil or honey. Okay, so maybe he is a ghost. That’s something. And funny, but the panic that rises in his chest is familiar and grounding. He forces himself to breathe slowly, carefully, like each gulp is barbed and dangerous. It occurs to him he probably doesn’t even need to breathe, but the act itself comforts him.

As he reaches the body suspended in the air, he can see a few crucial differences to the deadlights. First of all, Pennywise is fucking dead and the lights went out just as Eddie did. He’s seen them go dark, very, very dark. This body - his body? - is suspended as if it’s hooked into a child’s safety harness. One of those contraptions that make toddlers look like little dogs, for parents who know damn well their little hellions can’t be trusted not to dash off when mom is distracted for a second.

The light isn’t bathing him either, it’s coming from inside him, radiating from the center of his chest, his eyes and mouth. All the little holes he’s got. Makes him wonder about whether there’d be light shining out his ass if it wasn’t covered in dirty denim.

He chuckles, genuine mirth laced with an edge of insanity. Hoo, boy, he’s a ghost.

Eddie has to sit down.

The ground underneath him starts to wiggle.

Eddie shrieks and scrambles backward. The flat, rough stone he plopped down on begins to grow legs, a head, and starts to move. His brain is still in Pennywise mode so it takes him a while to understand he put his ass on a small turtle, a turtle that is now giving him the stink eye for disturbing his rest.

“Oh,” he says, “hey, uh, what’s up little buddy? Did you get lost or something?”

And then the turtle speaks.

+

Richie has one priority right now and it’s a little embarrassing that it took him this long to figure out. If he’s ever going to get over this, he needs to lay Eddie to rest. He needs to say goodbye in a tangible way, because the hole in his chest is just as awful and bloody as Eddie’s was, though maybe not quite as deadly. The jury is still out on that.

The entrance on Niebolt street is gone, no way to get back into It’s lair that way, but there are other tunnels down in the barrens. He has a vague idea that when he walks in there, he’s either going to die or he’s going to find what he’s looking for, no more uncertainty. The risk is worth it. Richie has very little left to lose and his friends are going to be just fine without him, should it come to that.

They seem to be fine without Eddie and Stan, so he’s honestly not expecting anyone to cry too much about him. Let’s be real, as much as he missed them all when he didn’t know them, he didn’t know them. That constant ache in his chest could have been heartburn.

He’s standing in front of a hardware store, a regional chain that’s popped up a decade or so back. Richie needs supplies, but more than that, he needs a plan. One does not simply walk into Mordor.

His phone rings, he’s had it on silent for sure, but it’s loud and clear as a bell now. It’s Beverly.

“Hey Bev,” he says, playing at nonchalant and losing.

Beverly sighs. “Richie, why do I have this persistent nagging feeling that you’re about to do something really stupid?”

Richie chuckles. “Because you know me?” And she does. That’s going to take some getting used to, being known. He’s lived a successful enough life with everyone kept at arm’s length. It’s not surprising that he could just walk out of it without anyone noticing or caring that much if they do.

“Richie,” Beverly says, the sound a reprimand laced with concern. Beep beep, Richie. “I’ve called my attorney, I’m getting a divorce.”

“That’s great, Bev.” He has no idea where this is going.

Beverly laughs. “It is great! And Mike is already on his way to see the world, he called a couple of hours ago to let us know.”

Richie frowns at the store, phone pressed to his ear harder than is generally recommended for those over-sensitive touchpads. Won’t be a good look if he hangs up on Bev with his earlobe. “I’m aware.”

“I know you are,” Beverely says. Then: “Why are you still in Derry?”

Richie’s grip on the phone tightens. “Unfinished business.” He’s clipped, wired and on edge. For some reason, he’s afraid his remaining friends might try to talk him out of this.

Then Beverly does the creepy thing, something they’d all done at times, something that he doesn’t think is connected to the monster at all. There has always been another power guiding them, a force beyond the creature that was killing its way through Derry’s history. A power that has given them uncanny insights and bonded them to each other. “You can’t go into the tunnels, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I won’t,” he says, hoping she hears “won’t go in the tunnels” instead of “won’t get myself killed” because one is a lie and the other one merely a hopeful possibility.

Beverly sighs, she’s heard exactly what he’s not saying and it breaks her heart. “Richie, please be careful. I can’t stop you and I wish I was there to help, but I can’t… I can’t do Derry anymore. It’s too much.”

Richie gets it. Derry is a creature all its own, a rotten, awful beast that still somehow continues to live, despite or maybe because of the parasite that had attached itself to the soul of the town before it was even a town. He hates Derry, and he also loves Derry, in a weird way that feels like blood and family. Can’t choose it, can’t live with it, but can’t ever forget it. Not in the way that matters, in your bones.

“I miss Eddie, too,” she says. He can hear the choked tears in her voice. “You know, that out of all of you, he and I had the most in common. Abusive parent, choosing to live all that again through our adult lives. So much fear. He was so brave, and I always admired that about him.”

“Bev-”

“No, let me say this, I won’t ever say it again because it’s fucked up and I hate it. But it’s not fair that Ben and I got our fairytale ending and you and Eddie got fucked over. Stan was bad, but somehow I think even Stan himself never expected to come home. But at least Stan made his own choice. Eddie deserved better, you deserved better, and I feel like the worst kind of selfish coward for running away to the other side of the country.”

Richie finds himself shivering badly, goose flesh all over his body. He can’t listen to this but he can’t stop either.

“And if something happened to you, too, I think I couldn’t take it. I think one more would break the circle completely. I think that if you are stupid enough to do what I think you are about to do, I need you to be so goddamn careful. Do not let Derry kill you.”

Richie chokes on the words he wants to say. “I- Bev, I promise.”

Beverly sighs. “You know how I know I can’t stop you? Because if it were me down there, I know Ben wouldn’t stop either.”

Richie gasps, involuntarily, because he’s not said it to someone who matters, not really, not ever. “Bev, what-”

“Beep beep, Richie. Don’t you dare lie to me about this. Not this.”

“I’m in love with Eddie,” Richie says, and something inside him rips open at the words. He can’t stop the tears now; hot, angry tears that burst from him like lava from a volcano.

Beverly stays quiet for a long moment, and then very quietly she says. “I know.”

+

In some aspects, the Losers had lived charmed lives. A group of seven, and six of them were the one percent? That’s statistically unlikely, to say the least.

Richie never thought about how easy it was to become a comedy superstar. Not just successful, but a genuine star with millions in bank accounts he has someone else worry over. He has enough money that money ceased to be something he thinks about.

Bill isn’t just a bestselling author, he’s a consistently bestselling author of one or two books a year, an author whose stories become movies and TV shows regularly, who gets royalties like regular paychecks.

Beverly is a world-famous designer with shows at fashion week in New York and Paris, but she’s not just famous and edgy, she’s a commercial hit, too. Her work reaches millions of people and her label outsells itself every year.

Ben Hanscom has built half the new skyscrapers of the 2010s. He’s designed for governments and big corporations. He gets to choose the face of cities in the decades to come.

Eddie…

Eddie’s job as a risk analyst sounds boring and predictable, but it put him in the same rooms as CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, government officials and very rich, very private citizens. And they paid him spectacularly well to make sure they stayed that way.

Stan, too, worked with the money of people who had so much of it that it often became its own thing. He was fantastic at it, both in the legal areas and the not quite so legal areas, and he was good enough to make sure that it never blew up in his own face.

But none of them, none of them, had ever gotten over Derry. They’d forgotten Derry and the monster and each other, quickly and completely, and that hole in them had grown and festered like a cancer. If any of them would have gone to therapy, a good psychologist might have noticed that they exhibited massive trauma responses without any obvious trauma. That would have been puzzling for the psychologist but maybe more puzzling for any of them, because the part where Derry hid itself inside their minds was a slippery cocoon, a spider nest full to bursting with tiny horrible monsters just waiting to be disturbed.

+

Eddie screams quite a bit before the turtle gets a word in edgewise. It speaks with a gravely voice, rough like the scrape of tectonic plates.

HELLO FRIEND, YOU LOOK A LITTLE CONFUSED.

“No shit,” Eddie yelps. “You’d look confused, too, if you were dead and watching your body vomit christmas lights. Also I’m talking to a turtle.”

The turtle chuckles. I HAVE DONE THAT, WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.

Eddie inches closer to get a good look at the turtle. It’s ordinary: a hard shell with legs, a tail and a head sticking out, sort of wrinkly, about the size of an oven mitt. It looks the way all turtles look, a slightly baffled face that reminds him of an accountant or butler, if accountants or butlers were literally tiny dinosaurs.

Eddie reaches out to reassure himself that this is real, forgetting for a moment that he himself is mostly intangible. The turtle, however, does not let his fingers pass through, it’s got a hard shell that Eddie can touch. He can’t help himself, he knocks on the shell and hears a dull sound, just the way he would expect under normal circumstances.

The turtle looks up at him. WHO’S THERE? It says, and the line is followed by a deep, sonorous chuckle.

“Oh my god,” Eddie says, “you think you’re funny.”

I AM VERY FUNNY. 

Eddie thinks about Richie, who has said the same thing on occasion, back then. He liked to play offended when Eddie didn’t think his shitty jokes were funny. God, Richie. Eddie hopes he and the others made it out okay after they defeated It, because this is literally what the aftermath of Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies would look like. It looks like the world collapsed and all that’s left is ruins.

“Hey, uh, magic turtle?” He’s sure it’s magic. There’s something bone-deep familiar about the little bugger, even though he’s never actually encountered a magic turtle; then again there are still parts of 1989 he doesn’t remember. “Can you tell me about my friends? Are they okay?” Is Richie okay?

HMM, the turtle says, a rumble. NEW EYES, DON’T SEE VERY WELL YET. BUT YOU CAN SEE THEM, IF YOU TRY.

Eddie swallows. “You die if you try,” he mumbles under his breath. The turtle regards him but doesn’t say anything else. Eddie sighs. “So what do I do? Just close my eyes and meditate or something?”

The turtle waits patiently for him to just get the hell on with it. It’s clearly not going to be magic mentor of the year with this attitude, but Eddie ends up doing what he thinks the creature wants. He sits down on the floor, legs crossed as comfortably as possible, leaning back against a boulder he hopes he’s not going to pass through. He closes his eyes and thinks: Richie.

He’s thinking about Richie for a good five minutes, the goddamn glasses and his wicked sense of humor, the way he smiles at Eddie when Eddie is being brave, the anger and resentment Eddie had sensed in him during their reunion. The fear. The secret he’s been hiding from all of them. Eddie knows Richie, he knows him, he-

Nothing happens. Eddie’s been focusing really hard and maybe got a little distracted at the end but seriously, what else is he supposed to do? He turns to the turtle and the turtle is suddenly glowing and massive, the size of a pickup truck, and very very bright.

“What the-” Eddie begins, but when he looks away from the turtle he’s no longer in the cave under the city. He’s in a stairwell, rickety and familiar. He’s standing there just as Richie bursts into the Derry Townhouse, hell on his heels. This is before, when Richie wanted to leave Derry instead of facing the monster again. Eddie wants to yell, to warn him about the Deadlights, but nothing gets Richie’s attention. Eddie tries to physically block Richie’s path and Richie passes right through him. It’s a weird, tingly sensation, as if all his limbs have fallen asleep.

Eddie yells in frustration. “This is not helping!”

I’M NOT ALLOWED TO HELP, the turtle says.

Eddie whirls around. “Then what the hell good are you? What’s the point of you?”

The turtle turns back into its tiny, realistic form. I MAY BE ABLE TO NUDGE, ON OCCASION.

Their surroundings have reordered themselves into the collapsed cave. Eddie has a feeling that he’s going to see a lot of this place in the near future, so he might as well make himself comfortable. He sits on a rock.

“So, is there a way out of this where I’m no longer a ghost? Because I literally just figured out that I married my mother and I have some stuff to work out!” It’s the first time he’s actually thought of Myra in quite some time and guilt shoots through him. She’s going to have one hell of year and he’s going to break her heart one way or the other. Either he stays dead, which: bummer, or he’s going to get a divorce. Now that he remembers almost everything, it’s really hard to convince himself he wasn’t on drugs when he committed to that disturbingly oedipal relationship, but Myra is not the villain of that story. She’s probably just as lost as him and in dire need of some therapy.

THE OLD MAGIC, the turtle says. THE CREATURE WAS USING FEAR, BUT THERE ARE OTHERS.

Eddie starts to suspect that mentoring isn’t the only thing the turtle is really bad at.

+

After a slight detour to burn off his feelings, Richie walks into a hardware store. It’s the beginning of a really bad joke and he doesn’t know the punchline yet, but already knows it’s a groaner. He feels like Georgie Denbrough’s little paper boat, caught in a storm much too big for it. He browses the stacks of gardening tools, home improvement and craft supplies, and wonders what he’s going to do if anything murderous is still alive in the sewers. He’s not a weapons kind of guy and honestly he’s not sure a gun would do him any good.

A perky salesgirl pops up and asks him what he needs. She has long blonde hair tied up in a loose pony tail and she looks like she’s maybe a high school senior working to supplement her allowance.

Richie dons his stage smile and turns up the charm. “I’ve recently discovered an interest in cave diving and I might have to move some rocks.”

The girl frowns and he can see she’s suspicious. Back in ‘89 the kids had all known more than the adults in town and perhaps it’s no different this time, except amplified by social media and the internet. Kids have ways of connecting now that people wouldn’t have dreamed of in his childhood, certainly no one would have imagined Twitter.

“Well, if you want climbing gear you should probably head down to the mall, there’s a Dick’s there that’ll cover you on that. I don’t think you’re supposed to be moving any boulders though. Might make a cave fall down on you.”

Richie thinks about the lair of the monster crashing down on his heart. “I promise I’ll be careful.”

She scans his face, maybe for signs that he’s the one taking kids. Then she nods. “Alright, it’s your funeral.” She leads him to a collection of ratchet hoists, crowbars and hammers, power tools and ropes. “Knock yourself out.”

Richie looks at the array of choice and sighs. He takes out his phone and looks through his contacts for Ben Hanscom, architect and engineer extraordinaire. Ben picks up like he’s been waiting for this call.

“Hey Rich, how can I help?” Ben sounds sleep tired.

Maybe Richie should apologize, but this is too important and frankly he feels like it’s a job for a team of losers, not one on his lonesome. Maybe they should have all stayed around to help him get Eddie out of that ugly, rotting excuse for a mausoleum. Maybe they should have taken Eddie with them in the first place. Maybe Richie feels a slight resentment about that, still. But that’s not fair and he knows it. They tried to save Richie, and Eddie was already gone. Priorities.

“I’m going down to the Barrens. I want to find a way back to Eddie, get him out of there.”

He can hear Ben’s reproachful silence as if it were a sermon. Eddie’s dead, it says. It’s a waste of time and resources. Don’t get yourself killed chasing after a ghost.

“Richie,” Ben says finally, “I’m really sorry.” Is he apologizing for leaving or for leaving Eddie behind? Or maybe for the thing Ben understands better than anyone else, the thing that he and Richie have in common: the madness of unrequited, thoroughly consuming love for a person who may never return those feelings - except Ben got lucky and Eddie got dead.

“Look, I just need some advice on supplies I need to bring. In case I have to dig all the way down.”

Richie can hear Beverly in the background. It’s been maybe, what, half an hour since they talked? Ben sits up, Richie can hear the rustling, and there’s a distinct sense of “let’s get shit done” over the line. There may as well be cracking knuckles. “Alright, I’m texting you a list of things and links to youtube videos about how to use them. Do not go into the sewers before you’ve fucking memorized them, Rich. You have no idea if there’s gonna be any reception down there and I need you to be prepared.”

One of the links is about how to recover a body from a cave-in, and Richie nearly bowls over the salesgirl on his way to throw up in the staff toilet.

+

Charmed lives. It’s as good a way as any to describe it, because they were hexed, ensorcelled, fucking glamoured to live out their trauma over and over again. Everything they learned that summer was swept away. Everything they could be if they had been allowed to remember and to heal from it, all lost to the will of creatures much greater than themselves.

The losers lived like an open wound, infected and festering.

Twenty seven years, and not a single one of them managed to outgrow the summer of ‘89. Now, at forty, it’s like they’re finally waking up from a nice but shallow dream, a dream that papered over the rotten foundation of their lives with expensive wallpaper.

+

“I want to try again,” Eddie says for the seventh time, hoping the turtle will finally divulge some secret about how to steer this bullshit ride. He’s been to his own past, and jesus, he hadn’t actually realized that Myra looks exactly like his mother, with better fashion sense. He’s been to the future, and it is nice to see Bill and his wife, Ben and Bev, with little kids, completely unbearably normal and happy. He hasn’t seen himself, or Richie, or even Mike when he skipped ahead and that’s, uh, troubling. A little. A lot. He asks about this one and the turtle nods in its turtle-y way.

SOME THINGS ARE NOT WRITTEN YET.

And isn’t that just completely unhelpful? Alright. Eddie closes his eyes and tries to empty his mind of distractions. He’s not calm, but calm hasn’t helped him on any of these trips, so he’s not looking for that. The thudding of his heart, the shallow, quick-fire rate of his breathing, it’s all a reminder that even if he isn’t right now, he certainly can be alive again. He hasn’t forgotten how to be.

He looks for the hook, the line that connects him to events in the losers’ lives. There’s one that feels different than the others, less tangible, and he tugs at it.

Eddie is surprised, not at being in the clubhouse, though it’s the first time that’s happened on his trips, but at the fact that Eddie and Richie are both there, and Eddie is… full on punching Richie in the face. That’s, uh, that’s definitely never happened. They’re both grown up and Eddie would fucking remember if they took time out of being terrified of the monster to rough each other up. It could be the future, but something tells him this is as close to the moment he died that he’s ever gotten.

It’s just… not real. “This is a dream,” he says, kind of offended that Richie would dream about them fighting, though weirdly it looks like Eddie is winning. Eddie, Dream-Eddie, is saying some really hurtful shit and Maybe-A-Ghost-Eddie is not okay with this turn of events.

The turtle nudges at his foot. It’s tiny, and that’s another hint this is a dream. TALK TO HIM.

Eddie concentrates so hard his vision is swimming, doubling, and suddenly he’s in the other place, has taken over the body of his dream counterpart, and it feels fleshy and real and breathing because maybe he’s breathing with Richie’s lungs and sharing the beat of Richie’s heart, and it’s too much, it’s-

“I didn’t even get to say it,” he says, needing to apologize for something he can’t even name. This is one of those things the losers do sometimes, these words from truths they haven’t even thought yet. “I made the worst possible joke because in the end, I was nothing but a coward.”

The dream dissolves so quickly that Eddie emerges from it panting and crying, emotions bursting from him in waves, so much pain, so much sorrow, but those are alive feelings, things for people who are not ghosts, and he clings to them with everything he’s got.

+

The Barrens are lush with life, always, and that’s the weirdest thing about the place the clown chose to live. So close to teeming, joyful, resilient life. Richie drags his supplies down the incline toward the softly churning water. He’s had some of the best times of his life here and he never even knew. What a shitty way to grow up.

He stares at the entrance to the sewers on the other side of the river, and sits down for a last moment of sanity. He shouldn’t be here. He should move on, like the others. That’s what closure is all about, accept that you fucked up your life and start to fix it. Not get yourself killed chasing ghosts. But he can’t think about Eddie lying down there, maggots crawling all over him, drenched in shitty water, slowly decomposing. Eddie deserves better and Richie needs to do some penance.

A part of him thinks that if he’d been braver long ago, neither of them would have had to live the last twenty seven years like caricatures. He doesn’t remember, not quite, but he feels like he owes Eddie an apology so monumental, it could never be expressed in words. Because he knows, he knows like he knows his own heart, that Eddie loved him, too, once. Maybe not like that, but maybe exactly like that.

When he looks up, of course he sees Eddie in the sewer entrance. This is Derry, this is blood magic and horror and old, old wounds. Just because the cancer is gone doesn’t mean the body is healed.

“Alright,” Richie says to the ghost, “let’s get this over with.”


	4. What Dreams May Come

The sewers are so much smaller now. Richie knows that this is mostly due the fact that he’s grown quite a bit since he was last here, but it’s other things, too. Some presence is gone, something that made the sewers more than scary tunnels, something that made them feel alive, predatory, dangerous. Not that he’s not scared shitless still, but it’s an oddly grownup fear of finding exactly what he means to find. It’s the kind of fear that has very little to do with monsters and everything to do with his own failures.

He tightens his grip on the duffel filled with tools, turns on the flashlight, and starts walking. He has a map, a real life paper map of the sewer system. Google is still telling him where it thinks he is, but reception is already spotty and GPS goes wildly off-kilter the moment he’s enclosed in concrete. Or maybe it’s as accurate as it can be, the sewers might still have quite a bit of magic on their own. All labyrinths do.

He knows which direction he has to go to head toward Niebolt street, but at the first big intersection, he sees a flash of movement down the other way. It’s probably rats.

“Hey, if you want me to go down that way, you need to be a little more obvious about it.” A splash of ice-cold water hits him at the back of the neck and Richie yelps. His heart rate is going through the roof.

It’s not like he expects to actually see a goddamn ghost, so when Eddie is right there, again, maybe a hundred feet away from him, Richie is starting to think he’s losing his mind. Once is grief, two might be a psychotic break. But he shrugs, says “Allrighty then”, and walks toward the dark outline of his dead friend. There’s something weird about an Eddie that’s basically a silent accusation. Eddie should never be mute, and Richie thinks not for the first time that if he only reaches Eddie, can touch him, maybe things will be okay.

He has no idea what makes that thought any less of a sign of impending total mental breakdown, because dead is dead and not even alien killer clowns can change that. Eddie’s dead. The thought is stark, like a punch to the sternum, and Richie gasps with the strength of it. He feels dizzy and nauseated, like coming off a murderous carousel.

Eddie’s dead.

Richie closes his eyes for a moment, unable to quite understand why it hits him now, here, like this, when it seemed to be so vague and unreal for most of the days since their battle with the monster. It hurts like hell.

Grief is a motherfucker. And Richie laughs, because that sounds like Eddie’s voice in his head and he can’t help but be charmed by it. Eddie’s presence in his life was missing so long, and still somehow never quit.

“I’m gonna find you,” he says, like a playful threat, and a promise.

+

Beverly left the day after they won the fight of their lives, leaving the boys with promises that she would write as soon as she could. Portland might as well have been the other side of the country for all that the Losers would be able to see her, but letters, at least, would let them feel connected.

“M-m-maybe we could take a bus,” Bill said a few days later, all six of them sitting in the clubhouse with a sense of irrevocable loss. Beverly had been such a huge part of their identity as a group, their strength. Without her, they truly felt like losers most of the day, except here, where they felt like the left behind.

Problem was, obviously, that they didn’t have an address, and Portland was big enough that just going there and hoping for the best would be stupid and probably pointless. So they waited to hear from her, to take their cues from Beverly as they used to do in so many other ways all through the summer.

But Beverly’s letters never came.

The boys kept waiting, though they stopped expecting it by the time the trees started to change their color to match Beverly’s hair. By Christmas, only Ben and Bill were still talking about meeting up with her. Richie would roll his eyes and stare at Eddie with an apprehension he didn’t understand. A sickly dread started in his heart that he couldn’t really put into words.

School that year kept them busy enough that they met less and less, little groups more often, but rarely all of them together. Eddie and Richie had most of their classes together (no surprises there, Richie didn’t have any preferences and just followed Eddie around wherever he wanted to go) but Mike was still being homeschooled and Ben had a lot of science-y classes the others weren’t interested in.

One of the rare occasions that had them all in the clubhouse together, in early spring 1990, cold as fuck after a harsh and excessive winter, started with Bill finally letting go. He threw a baseball up in the air, eyes focused on the arc of the movement. Up and catch, up and catch. Richie found himself mesmerized by the rhythm.

“I th-the-think Beverly isn’t going to write,” he said, quietly as if to himself.

Ben sighed. “It’s been six months. You’re probably right.” But his hands were clenched and the set of his jaw implied that he wasn’t ready, not ready at all to forget about her. Richie felt for him, he really did.

“I really think she just found better friends to hang out with, I wouldn’t want to pine for you guys either.” Richie looked at Eddie for backup, but Eddie didn’t return his gaze. “C’mon, there have to be cooler people than us in Portland. It was just a matter of time!”

Bill threw the ball at him, not entirely gently, and Richie took his cue to shut up. There was talk then, about new movies, new games, nothing anywhere close to what they had shared that summer. It was nice enough but they could tell that something was missing. 

It would be the last time they were all together after Beverly went away.

As they went home, Richie followed a very quiet Eddie through the woods. It was a deeply disturbing experience and Richie tried to fill the silence with bad jokes, none of which landed. Eddie was deep in thought.

“Listen,” Richie said, trying for serious, “I didn’t think you missed her so much. I’m sorry if I made you feel bad about it.”

Eddie sighed, stopped, and turned to face Richie. “It’s not that I miss her, which okay, I guess I do. We all do. She’s Beverly, you kind of can’t help missing her. Actually, that’s the problem, I sort of forgot that I was missing her until Bill brought her up, and that’s really weird because she’s Beverly! But what happened last summer, it all kind of feels like a dream. A shitty dream with a lot of dead kids!”

Eddie was breathing fast at the end of his speech and Richie was sure he’d reach for his inhaler, but he didn’t. He hadn’t been using it since the end of the summer. Richie knew that, he’d noticed it and commented on it with a mix of pride and teasing. Richie knew that, and still, he’d expected Eddie to fall back on the old habit. He had no idea why.

“Would you believe it, if some kid told you what we saw? What we did? It’s gotta be our brains, like, protecting themselves, right?”

Eddie nodded. “I guess that’s possible.”

Something nagged at Richie’s subconscious, and he couldn’t help himself when he said, “Hey Eds? I promise you and I will always be friends.”

Eddie huffed. “Don’t call me that, Trashmouth.” But he was smiling, a private, happy smile that made Richie feel warm and content. The feeling lasted until he dropped Eddie off at his house and faded as he walked, slowly, to his own house, hearing for a long way the shrill voice of Eddie’s mom berating him about dressing properly for the cold.

“One step forward,” he said.

+

“Two steps back.” Richie finds himself in front of a solid wall, nowhere to go but back the way he’s come. Since his supplies don’t include heavy duty explosive materials or a jackhammer, this is where this particular road ends. His flashlight casts fantastical shadows everywhere, bringing the sewers to new and unsettling life. His imagination is doing the rest.

Down here, he has to remind himself that the clown is gone, for real, forever. He crushed the fucker’s heart in his hand with the other Losers (except for Eddie, who was dying). Richie puts his fist into the wall, screaming in pain when his knuckles connect with force. The bone-deep agony blooms in his hand and travels up his arm to his shoulder, where it lodges like a stray bullet.

“Fucking ow,” he says, shaking out his hand and waiting for the sting to recede.

“Were you always this stupid,” a familiar voice asks, “Or is this a special case of moronitis.”

Richie can’t turn around, he can’t look. Because he knows that if he sees Eddie the way all the other ghosts were, subtly wrong, subtly dead, he won’t be able to handle it. He knows this is his mind disintegrating from the massive pressures of the last couple of days. He doesn’t turn around and his voice sounds hoarse when he says, “That just means that my moron is on fire, which hey, at least you didn’t burn alive.” He leans against the wall, forehead pressed to the rough, damp surface.

Eddie laughs. “I didn’t know I was your personal moron,” and it sounds exactly like the soft, self-deprecating Eddie that had scared young Richie so much because his teenage heart couldn’t take it. Angry Eddie was a delight, but soft Eddie was a death sentence to Richie’s ability to function.

He turns, despite himself, and Eddie is… he’s not there. The tunnel is empty.

“Sure, yeah,” he says, “okay, Richie. Get a fucking grip on yourself. It’s all in your head, focus on the task.” Except, wasn’t Pennywise mostly in their heads, too? That’s not as reassuring as he wishes it was.

+

Bill’s parents announced they’d be getting a divorce in the early summer, and their intent to both leave Derry in opposite directions because the memories were just too much. Their instincts were sound, even if a bit late in the game. They left Bill the choice who to go with, but not whether he wanted to leave. Bill spent the next few days in morose silences, enough so that Richie started to worry.

After school, Richie dragged Eddie and Bill to the Arcade. It was where he felt most at home, though even that had been touched by the clown.

“How about we have a tournament, huh? If I win, you go with your mom,” and he snickered, because both of his friends rolled their eyes without him even having to make the joke. Haha, funny, Richie fucks their mothers, what a good joke. What a joke. “And if Eddie wins, you go with your dad.”

Bill nodded, but looked puzzled. “What if I w-w-win?”

Richie glanced at Eddie, who was smirking. They both broke out in laughter. Richie clapped a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “You’re welcome to try, Big Bill.”

Thing was, Bill played like the devil that day, and he could have won if Richie and Eddie hadn’t been down here nearly every day beating each other’s high scores. He was clearly out to prove something, that maybe if he won he could be his own person, make his own choices. Maybe everything that followed would have been different, if the remaining members of Bowers’ little gang hadn’t shown up to harass them about the Losers’ perceived involvement in Henry’s arrest.

Bill stood up to them and got himself punched in the face so hard blood burst from his nose like a fountain. Richie went down from a very deliberate kick in the balls, accompanied with some serious homophobic slurs, and after that both him and Bill only barely managed to hold Eddie back from clawing Belch Huggins’ eyes out.

They made a tactical retreat, adrenaline running high, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in a dizzying haze in the early summer sun, down in the Barrens where no one ever seemed to bother them.

Bill’s mother, however, used his bloodied, swollen face to make a swift and determined exit, much faster than anyone could have anticipated. It was the last straw for a woman who had buried one child already and wasn’t going to watch another get hurt. Not anymore.

They left that Friday right after school, giving Bill no time at all to say goodbye to his friends. Stan was there when his mother dragged him out of the house, folded him into the car and floored the gas pedal as if pursued by demons. Bill tried to signal him that he would call as soon as he got wherever they were going and that’s the last any of them saw of Bill for twenty-seven years.

Richie and Stan and Eddie had known Bill much longer than the others, they’d been in the same classes for years, grew up playing at the same secret locations. They were sure they’d hear from him. For days, Richie stayed home and waited near their phone, making sure not to miss when Bill finally checked in.

Bill did not check in.

Bill was gone as thoroughly as Bev had been and no amount of denial would change that. Stan was the first to say it, because Stan always noticed patterns and connected dots, even if he didn’t want to.

“I think it’s the creature,” he said as he and Richie went home from school, two weeks after Bill left. “I think it’s making sure that what happens in Derry, stays in Derry.”

Richie frowned. “That’s insane, Stan, my man. We killed it.” He tried to project a certainty he didn’t feel.

Stan just shrugged, clearly he wasn’t going to argue. But the thought didn’t leave Richie’s mind, burrowing in there like a ticking clock.

+

Richie is dreadfully lost. The sewers aren’t that big, they shouldn’t be this interwoven or with this many dead ends, but they are, somehow, a real labyrinth. He has no other choice than to follow the occasional, very Eddie suggestions that pop up whenever he seems to be going the wrong way, but where it’s going to lead him is anybody’s guess.

At this point he’s half-convinced he’s dealing with a real ghost, while the other half of him is dead certain he’s having a complex mental breakdown. People have been known to exist in fugue states for days, even weeks. It’s possible his mind is making all of this up, reality be damned. It’s not like reality was ever a solid, tangible concept to any of them after Pennywise. Yes, magic is real, but does that mean everything is real or nothing is? Does it matter?

“Hey, Eddie-o, how about a little help here? I think I’m about ready to have a big emotional epiphany that will open up the magic door to the treasure.”

“Huh,” Eddie’s voice says, rather more close than Richie expects. “I really don’t think you are.”

Richie groans, leaning back against the closest wall, eyes shut hard. “You ethereal motherfucker, what’s that even supposed to mean?”

Eddie laughs. The sound comes from right beside Richie, as if they’re standing shoulder to shoulder. Richie wants nothing more than to turn slightly to his left, open his eyes, and see Eddie there, whole and safe and alive. It’s not going to work and he doesn’t know if he’s more afraid of a grotesque, rotting corpse or thin air. At least he understands the purpose of showing him Eddie slowly rotting away, it’s straight up horror movie stuff, his fears come to life. He doesn’t understand this disembodied voice bullshit.

“I think it means,” Eddie whispers in his ear. Richie can almost feel the hiss of air across his skin. “That you’re an idiot.”

“Hey,” Richie snaps, offended on behalf of idiots everywhere. Eddie would be smirking at him, glowing with pride at having gotten to him. “That’s not very helpful.”

Eddie sighs. “Yeah, well, I’m learning from the best.” Something shifts, it’s almost but not quite like the rustling of clothes. Richie presses his eyelids together. He can’t look. He wants to look. He wants so badly for Eddie to be there. “I think you’re still missing something, something really fucking big, and I can’t tell you what it is.”

+

“I don’t know what it is,” Eddie said as he and Richie pushed their bikes home from school, first day of junior year. They didn’t feel any more adult in high school, but teachers treated them differently. There was a weird sense, now, that what they did mattered to the adults in the room. “But things are still fucked up.”

Richie, who had grown two inches since last summer, nodded absently. He was watching Eddie, cataloging him, and that would probably be creepier if Richie wasn’t doing it out of a bone-deep fear. Ben’s mother had found a new job across the country and taken her son away before school started. Richie was terrified Eddie was going to leave him, too.

“Stan thinks the monster isn’t dead.” Stan and Mike were research buddies these days, spending all their free time in the library or interviewing Derry’s elderly. They were trying to document the appearances of It, in case it ever came back.

Eddie cringed, and Richie couldn’t help smiling. Every goddamn expression of Eddie’s was so damn cute. “Yeah, no, I don’t think it’s dead either. It’s not a coincidence that we don’t hear from the others. It wants to divide us, make sure we’re not a threat when it starts all over again.”

Richie grinned, and in his movie trailer voice said: “Will the champions return despite their foe’s terrible power? Don’t miss Chapter Two: Twenty Seven Years Later.” You could hear the capitalization of every word. Eddie punched him lightly in the shoulder.

“Jesus, Richie, it’s not a game. We might die.”

Laughing, Richie walked ahead and then turned around, walking backwards so he could watch every minute detail of Eddie’s face. It also had the added benefit of driving Eddie absolutely bonkers. “Yeah, we might die. When we’re forty!”

“Watch where you going, you asshole!” There was no one but them on the road, and Richie felt invincible.

“Relax, Eds,” Richie spread his arms, letting his bike fall against his side. “I’m destined to die when we’re forty, in an epic battle against our childhood monster. It will be glorious.”

“Stop it,” Eddie shrieked, and there was real anxiety in his voice. Richie dropped his arms. “You are not going to die, okay?”

Richie stopped, his bike sliding to the ground in a metallic heap. “I didn’t know you cared.”

Eddie was nearly vibrating with repressed energy, but he wasn’t looking at Richie. Maybe that would be too much. “I do, okay? So maybe don’t ever talk like that.”

Richie took a step toward Eddie, then another. He was approaching as if Eddie was a skittish deer, ready to bolt at any moment. When he reached him, Richie realized how much taller he was now, and smiled.

“Hey,” he said, “look at me.” But Eddie shook his head, still bowed, still hiding his face. Richie touched Eddie’s chin with his index finger and nudged it upward. Eddie looked at him then and Richie understood. The fear of loss in those beautiful, shining eyes was reflected in his heart. He said, “I’m here, I’m fine, and nothing bad is going to happen, okay? We’re going to go to college very far away to study something ridiculous and by the time we’re forty neither of us will even have to think about this shitty town.”

Eddie gave him a wobbly smile. “As if you’d have the patience for college.”

Richie… Richie wanted to kiss Eddie then, a feeling so pure and intense he could imagine it vividly. He’d lean down and brush their lips softly, letting Eddie take the lead on whether to keep going, all gentlemanly, with a rom com finish. He blushed hard and dropped his hand as if it was on fire.

“Uh,” he said, trying to remember what they’d been talking about. “Right. I could just be your kept man, you know. I’d make a very good trophy husband.”

Eddie shook his head. “You’re an idiot.”

Richie picked up his bike, mostly so he had something to do with his hands. “Sure, but I’m your idiot.”

Eddie didn’t deny it. They finished the walk in a strange, but not uncomfortable silence. Arriving at Eddie’s house, Richie had forgotten all etiquette of saying goodbye to his best friend. He fidgeted, trying to find the words he needed to get out, but couldn’t quite make sense of any of this. Eddie, too, looked miserable, until he very softly put a hand on Richie’s hand and squeezed.

“See you tomorrow?” A question about something completely different.

Richie turned his hand around awkwardly and grasped Eddie’s fingers in his for just a second. “Yeah,” he said softly. “See you tomorrow.” A promise.

+

Richie, eyes still shut, suddenly remembers something. “He thrusts his fist against the post and still insists he sees the ghosts!” He yells it, like an epiphany in the bathtub, and he reaches out with his hand. “Eddie, do you remember? Bill used to say this all the time, under his breath, it was supposed to help him with his stutter.”

“He never managed to say it all at once,” Eddie says, right in front of him. Like he’s crouching only inches away from where Richie has been sitting.

Richie connects with something, something solid and warm. He knows he can’t open his eyes. There are rules to magic. “Eddie,” he says, and his voice is cracking under the pressure of his feelings.

Eddie hums, and the vibration translates through Richie fingers. He’s touching Eddie’s collarbone, his shoulder, his neck. Richie can’t handle this, he can’t. “Uh, Richie, you need to get up. You need to keep going.” Eddie sounds worried, as if Richie is going to just lie down here and die.

Richie laughs. “Yeah, uh, yeah, absolutely. Just give me a minute.” And he squeezes the nape of Eddie’s neck. It feels like heaven.

Eddie, fairly vibrating with concern, leans closer, and Richie is suddenly terrified that Eddie is going to try and kiss him. Not here, he thinks, not like this. But Eddie just presses his forehead to Richie’s and breathes with him for a minute. It all feels so goddamn real. Richie wants to cry.

“I think I know what it means,” Richie says. “I think it means that whatever is happening is happening because we believe it. You and me. And I refuse to believe you’re a ghost, alright. Or some magic trick. Or my brain jumping off a high cliff.”

Eddie snickers, “Your brain jumped the shark ages ago.”

“You’re such an asshole, Edward.” I don’t know why I love you, he can’t quite say. It’s the wrong time, but also it’s a little bit of a lie. Richie knows exactly why he loves Eddie Kaspbrak. Because he’s an angry ball of anxiety, a cute, neurotic, incredibly brave, emotionally stunted man who actually likes Richie’s company. Richie loves him because Eddie is Eddie, and there was never anyone else who compared.

“Hey,” Eddie says, and the presence moves. “Let’s go.”

Richie nods, pushes himself up off the floor and reaches out his hand. “Take me to your leader,” he says in his best alien robot voice. The laugh he gets from Eddie is gratifying, but the hand in his, the solid, warm grip, is worth the world.

+

It all happened faster than it had any right to, and Richie would have been so pissed off about it for a very long time, if his own parents weren’t also taking him away. For some reason the weird complacency that normally settled on adults living in Derry had faded and all their parents were quite suddenly aware that they were living in a death trap.

When Mrs. Kaspbrak announced they were leaving Derry for New York, Richie’s world fucking shattered. He was fourteen, deeply confused about everything in the world, except the one thing he was sure about: Eddie. He couldn’t let it happen, he couldn’t. Except that he didn’t get a choice, because his parents took him aside the same day and told him to get ready to say goodbye to his friends.

He wanted to yell, “I’ve been saying goodbye to my friends for a year, it’s not fucking fair,” but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. So he ran, picked up his bike and went to the Barrens. Eddie would be there in a bit, and maybe Mike and Stan, too. Since Mike’s parents were dead and his grandpa was too tied up in Derry, out of all of them, he might be the only one who’d stay around, and remember what they did. Like a historian of their little band of Losers.

Eddie rode his bike with a devil on his back, but as soon as he saw Richie, he hit the brakes hard. They were staring at each other. Richie had so much to say to him and didn’t fucking know how.

“Hey, Eds,” he said, finally.

Eddie scowled, shaking with anger. “Don’t fucking call me that, trashmouth.”

Eddie pushed off the bike and let it clatter to the floor, advancing on Richie with fire in his eyes. Richie just stood there and waited for the storm to hit. Eddie barreled into him and punched his chest with closed fists, like pounding on a church door to beg for refuge. Richie put his own arms around Eddie and held him close, unable to stop himself from whispering quiet words of reassurance.

“It’s okay,” he lied, “it’s all going to be okay.” He pressed his face into Eddie’s hair.

Eddie was crying. The sobs tore something inside Richie wide open, some essential armor he had worn all his life, and the tears burst from him, too. He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to stop it.

Later, when Mike and Stan showed up, they told stories, all the stories they could remember, about the Losers who were already gone. Richie made sure to do all the best voices, to create something that Mike would be able to take with him, for however long it was necessary.

+

There’s a an intermittent silence as they stumble through the sewers, severely impaired by the fact that one of them is technically, probably not even really there, and one of them has their eyes closed the entire time. Richie laughs about it to himself but when he tells Eddie, he doesn’t think it’s funny.

“You never think my jokes are funny,” Richie remarks as he crawls over a boulder. They… have left the sewer part behind, this is a damp cavern now, with a mass of rocks in their way. Richie navigates the path by touch and the sound of Eddie’s voice.

“I think your jokes are fine,” Eddie says, “when you actually manage to be original.”

It’s not fair that Eddie doesn’t even sound out of breath, he could at least pretend that he’s as exhausted as Richie feels. “I, uh, I totally wrote my own material at first, you know? But it was too angry and too raw and I couldn’t explain why. I was writing jokes like Hannah Gadsby but I sounded like Jeff Dunham, and it didn’t sell well.”

Eddie huffs. “That’s stupid.”

There are small, sharp rocks digging into Richie’s palms and knees, and he can feel the jagged ceiling scraping across his back. They’re both damn lucky he’s only mildly claustrophobic - he’s quite comfortable in small spaces, if they’re at least the size of a closet. “Eh, it’s hard if you’re pretending to be Joe Normal but all your jokes are about how shit life was growing up in a small town. I think they all thought I was actually the bully, when I was a kid.”

Eddie laughs, and that’s the last thing Richie hears before the ground gives out beneath him and he tumbles down a steep incline, rocks and boulders hitting him in sensitive places all the way down. He comes to a stop maybe fifty feet below where he was, at the mouth of a large cave. He’s opened his eyes during the fall and can see the shape of the lair as it was, but rearranged into a death monument. It looks fragile. At the center he can see a figure bathed in light.

“Uh,” he says, and that’s the extent of his brain’s capacity right now.

Beside him, Eddie kneels down to inspect his injuries. Eddie’s fingers pass right through him, but he can feel them, somehow. It’s not quite physical, but not quite unreal. “If you’re dying from this, that’s going to be really awkward for everyone involved,” Eddie says.

Richie groans. “I can see you.”

Eddie looks into his eyes, and whoa, that’s a lot. There’s a lot in there. Richie can’t deal with that right now. “Yeah, I figure since we’re closer now, I get more, uh, real. Also, you didn’t break anything, but you’re going to have, like, all the bruises.”

Richie smirks and tries to get up. Everything, absolutely everything hurts, but all the things that need to be working are, in fact, working, so he’s just going to have to deal. “Up and at them,” he says as he drags himself to his feet.

Eddie winces with sympathy.

On the way down, Richie dares to reach for Eddie’s hand, and whether it’s because he believes it so strongly or because they’re getting closer to whatever magical fuckery is happening under Derry, still, when Richie closes his fingers around Eddie’s, they’re real and warm and slightly damp from sweat.

And he thinks, I’m never letting you go. Never again.

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think at 10k of story written faster than I have in literal years, I have to admit that I may be a little bit into this fandom. Come talk to me about it on twitter, I need more people to freak out about Richie and Eddie with. @realsuaine


	5. The Tower Stands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has Dark Tower in its bones.

This is how the world ends.

A man climbs to the top of a lonely tower. The tower stands at the center of the world, the center of all worlds. It is a rose. The man climbs to the top of the tower and makes a choice.

This is how the world ends.

+

The cavern is enormous and this isn’t where they entered the first time; this is way above and further back, far enough to really bring home just how huge of a hollow the monster had carved for itself. It looks like a massive explosion suspended in time with a small glowing body at its core. Richie tries to swallow the drought in his mouth, but the attempt just makes him feel worse.

“Uh,” Eddie says, “guess we made it?”

Richie chokes on a desert, and spits out a dusty laugh. “Yeah, guess we did.” He squeezes Eddie’s hand, has no idea if it helps or if Eddie can even tell, but it makes him feel grounded. Eddie squeezes back.

The climb down is hard and slow. Richie keeps slipping on pebbles, as if they’re slick with sweat and blood, invisible only because the monster is gone. But the debris and the residue are still here, still turning this physical space into a cathedral of death. Down, down, down they go, until finally, Richie’s foot hits gravel. This is even ground, or what passes for even ground in a bomb crater.

He hesitates. Eddie’s dead. Or was dead, at least. These things, they don’t just get better. He can believe in ghosts, it’s harder to believe in miracles.

“That’s you, isn’t it?” Richie asks quietly and doesn’t need confirmation. He can feel the truth of it in his aching, hollow bones.

Eddie sighs. “Yeah, turns out instead of going to, like, heaven or something, I ended up as a Christmas decoration. If that’s some sort of comment on my life, I really don’t get it. Also, I’ve spent most of the last few weeks talking to a turtle, so I don’t really trust my grasp on reality at the moment.”

Richie does a double take, mouths “weeks” under his breath. Time is a funny thing and Richie has slightly lost track of the days since Eddie’s death, but he’s certain it can’t have been more than four or five. Then he catches up with the rest of the sentence. “A turtle?”

Eddie grimaces. “Magic turtle. He taught me how to, uh, appear to you, so you can see me. It’s my ghost mentor, I guess? Some kind of spirit guide? I don’t really know. It’s not like I’ve ever been dead before. I don’t know how any of this works.” He looks like he’s having a quiet panic attack, but Richie is frankly half-way there himself, so he’s not really in a comfort-giving place.

Richie drags Eddie to… Eddie’s body, and that’s going to require some therapy in the future, if they have one. Eddie’s growing increasingly quiet the closer they get to the thing at the heart of the chamber. Richie pulls him along, unwilling to risk letting go. If this is like a time-travel paradox they might be in trouble, because he vaguely remembers that you’re not supposed to touch another version of yourself, but he rather thinks they’re in a horror movie and the worst thing that could happen is they both get skewered by a monster that isn’t actually dead.

“Hey, Eds,” he says, looking back at Eddie who looks deathly pale in the way only alive people could - like death is standing over their shoulder with an icy hand on their neck. “Have you seen any sign of the clown since we killed it? Because this sure as hell looks like fucking magic to me.”

With a shrug, Eddie walks forward, and comes to stand next to Richie by the glowing not-quite-corpse. Richie can see the dried blood. It’s exactly where he’s last seen it, just as they abandoned Eddie to this filthy grave. Guilt rises in his throat like bile.

“Fuck, Eddie, fuck. I’m so sorry,” he’s focused on the body, but intimately aware that the Eddie beside him is shaking with emotions. He really wants to give him a fucking hug, but Richie has a feeling that that’s not going to work out well for either of them. He’s counting the handholding as a win, a gift, and won’t ask for more - at least not right now.

Eddie stumbles over his words, reminding them both of Bill’s worst days. “Shit, I, uh, I hadn’t even. I hadn’t really looked at it before. That’s really me. I… I’m dead, aren’t I? I’m really dead.” He’s getting ever more high-pitched and Richie can’t take it.

“Hey,” he says, turning to fully face Eddie, the Eddie that has been talking to him and guiding him, and has casually been the kind of dick that Richie fell in love with so long ago. Richie let’s go of Eddie’s hand to try and cup his face. For a terrifying second Richie is afraid his hands are going to pass right through Eddie’s skin, but he’s solid enough. A little cold, a little ethereal, but there. Enough. Enough.

“Hey,” Richie says again. “Look at me. Please.” And Eddie does. His eyes are big and dark and full of terror, and Richie is falling all the way. He strokes Eddie’s good cheek with his thumb, even though the injured side isn’t visibly marred. He just doesn’t want to risk it, not when everything about this moment feels so fucking fragile.

Pulling an unnecessary breath through slightly transparent teeth, Eddie leans closer, like there’s something pulling him up and toward Richie. It’s the moment, Richie can feel it. He wants to lean down, he wants to close his eyes and give himself to the moment, but something stops him. He’s not ready. Eddie sighs and drops his forehead on Richie’s shoulder instead, the tension gone, but not the shaking. Eddie is terrified and Richie is a coward.

He cups the back of Eddie’s neck and this is basically already an embrace so he goes for it. The moment he tightens his grip, all of his feelings go haywire and he hugs Eddie harder than would be healthy, if Eddie had any need to breathe.

“You’re squishing me, asshole,” Eddie says into his shoulder. He makes no effort to escape. In fact, his own ghostly grip tightens around Richie’s waist.

“Shh,” Richie hisses and presses his face into Eddie’s sweat slick hair. “Don’t ruin it.”

“Don’t ruin it? Don’t ruin it, he says! That’s rich, Richie. Real funny.” Eddie’s words are muffled by the fact he’s got his face mushed up against Richie’s neck. “You’re hilarious. Is that why Netflix cancelled you, they couldn’t take how fucking funny you are?”

Richie grinned, despite the entirety of their fucked up situation. “No, that was because no one thinks my jokes about your mom are funny, apparently.”

Eddie shakes harder, and now it’s with ill-concealed laughter. Richie’s still got it. This was always the best part about being a brash loudmouth, making Edward Kaspbrak lose his shit. Everything after was a pale imitation at best.

Richie, staring out at the dark beyond their little circle of magical light, takes his chance to say what he doesn’t know how to say to Eddie’s face. “You know, you were it for me, right? After I left Derry, I forgot everything, but it didn’t stop my feelings. I knew there was something missing from my life. I knew I’d left the most important thing behind.”

Eddie snorts. “Yeah, at least you didn’t marry a carbon copy of your mother after your actual abusive mother died, to keep up the status quo.” His hands are trembling where they’re fisted in Richie’s loud, ugly shirt.

Laughing, because if he doesn’t laugh he’s going to start crying, Richie says: “No, I just stayed in a goddamn closet my whole life and told other people’s terrible jokes. I haven’t been myself since I left Derry. I missed you so fucking much and I didn’t even know it.”

Eddie draws in a wet, shaky breath, a near sob that breaks Richie’s heart. “Me too, Richie. God. Me, too.”

Richie gathers all his strength, all the bravery he didn’t even remember he had until a few days ago, until he got back his life and lost it again in the space of hours, and pushes Eddie away just enough so he can really look at him. Eddie still looks like Eddie. Out of a thousand people in a lineup, Richie would always recognize him.

“I really fucking love you, you know that?” Richie’s heart is beating out of his chest. He has forgotten how to breathe. His vision is simply Eddie, and everything else is darkness. This is it. This is what he’s been afraid of and hoping for and everything he has never allowed himself to feel. The truth, barebones and jagged and finally, finally out.

Eddie stares. “Uh,” he says, clearly still buffering the information. Richie is totally going to give him the time to process this monumental revelation. “What?” Eddie’s face is expressive and it goes through several emotions in rapid succession. Shock, disbelief, anger. There’s grief.

And then, a delighted, fragile joy. Richie allows himself to smile tentatively, hopefully. He’s unprepared for the smack Eddie gives the back of his head. “Oh my god, you are such an idiot.” Then Eddie smacks his own forehead. “I’m such an idiot!” He looks like he’s having this conversation mostly with himself. “What the hell? How did we never? How could we not realize? This is so goddamn stupid.”

Eddie is wired, energy coursing through him, and he’s vibrating with it, bouncing on his feet. He’s solid and physical and there, and then he throws himself at Richie. Their lips meet with force, mashing together, and it shouldn’t feel like Richie’s world is being set on fire but it does. He can taste Eddie, there’s the metallic tang of blood and old breath and jesus, it’s the best flavor of Richie’s life.

Eddie seems to want to crawl right into Richie, and Richie obliges, grabs his thighs so Eddie can wrap his legs around Richie’s waist to get some goddamn leverage. It’s like they’re one person, connected at the mouth, the hips, everywhere between. Richie laughs into the kiss and he can taste his own tears on Eddie’s lips.

“I love you,” Richie says when he comes up for air. “I love you,” he presses into the reality of Eddie’s not-quite skin. “I love you.”

That’s when the glow from the body next to them intensifies, becomes its own living thing, expands, expands, until Richie can see nothing but light, and the press of Eddie’s body along his disappears.

+

It’s so fucking bright, Eddie has to close his eyes or get blinded. When he opens them, Richie is gone. Eddie’s on a beach, the sand bonewhite and fine as dust under his feet. The ocean crashes hard into the shore like a battle fought between titans of equal power; push and pull the same, but never gentle.

Eddie is about to call for the turtle, because what the actual fuck, when pain registers all over his body. His cheek throbs, his head is pulsating with migraine, his chest is on fire. He can’t breathe. Eddie’s heart, somehow still beating, is giving rapid, desperate pumps that are somehow not enough to fill the rest of him with blood.

He’s bleeding. His hands are scraped, his legs are torn open, he’s filthy and bruised everywhere and somehow alive.

He’s alive. This is his aching, shattered body. It’s real, it’s broken and fucked up beyond belief, but it’s real and alive.

Eddie falls to his knees. He grips the sand in his bloody hands, smearing red all over the pristine whiteness. Tears turn the color a muddy pink and Eddie doesn’t know why he’s crying, or how he still has a body, but it’s his and he’s in it. He’s alive.

He drops all the way to the sand, turns on his back and yells at the sky.

+

This is how the world ends.

A man walks into a tower. The tower is crumbling, the wheel has been broken. Chaos reigns, darkness beckons. A man walks into a tower and is given a choice.

This is how the world ends.

All things must end for them to begin again.

+

“I fucking hate magic,” Richie screams at the unforgiving whiteness surrounding him. There are no features, no changes, just bright, horrible light. “Do you hear me? I hate all of this so much. It’s all bullshit.”

He can’t tell how long he’s been here or what, if anything, is happening. His body feels weightless and when he tries to lie down on what is ostensibly a floor, it just feels the same as standing up. He’s not floating, thank god, but it’s a world without sensation. He breathes only because that’s what his body thinks he needs to do, there’s no pressure building in his body when he tries to hold his breath, no need to let it go.

Richie thinks he might be dead, and okay, if he’s traded his life for Eddie’s that would not be the worst possible outcome. It’s shitty because somewhere deep down he had just started to hope that things could work out for them, but if someone has to be dead, Richie’d rather it be him.

Time passes, or doesn’t. Richie starts to tell funny stories about his childhood and they’re hilarious because they’re also horrifying. These are the best jokes he’s ever told, and there’s no one here to listen. He yells at the void, and the void stays silent. He tries running and it sort of feels like movement, but there’s no change in the air, no scenery, and no physical exertion, so maybe he’s just imagining that.

Richie thinks about Eddie, a lot. He thinks about Eddie’s stupid face and his big doe eyes, his angry eyebrows, his frowny lips. He thinks about the way those lips taste, even if his one and only contact was with a ghostly double. He thinks about what he wants to do with Eddie - not just touching him everywhere, making him scream, but also just sit on a couch together and watch terrible movies cuddled up like a two-person puppy pile. He wants all of it, wants it so much it hurts all the way down to his soul. His body doesn’t need food, or water, or air, here in this weird bright nothingness, but it aches all over with yearning.

+

The turtle has a friend.

Eddie stares at the pair as they slowly make their way to him, turtle firmly lodged in the cradle of a boy’s arm. For a crazy moment, Eddie thinks that’s Georgie, for sure, it must be him, but as they come closer it becomes clear that this is a boy Eddie has never seen before. He’s as old as the Losers were when they first battled Pennywise, thirteen-ish, give or take, and his eyes look ancient and sad.

Eddie feels fear crawl up his spine like a spider up a drain pipe. He doesn’t think the kid is going to straight up murder him, at least not without some polite words being exchanged first, but he has a feeling his life is in very real danger. His wounds start throbbing with a disturbing rhythm that is somehow the same beat as the boy’s foot steps in the sand.

A mad second has Eddie contemplating flight, running as fast and as far as his legs can carry. It would not be very far, but at least it would be more than just sitting here, waiting for his destiny to come for him on bare feet. Had the kid been wearing shoes before? Of course not, Eddie would have noticed that.

Sitting up, pushing himself off the ground, if Eddie has any inclination to run, it leaves him at the way his muscles shriek as he tries to stand. His body is on fire with pain. His rabbit heart misses a beat as his head begins to swim and his vision blurs. Eddie is not okay.

“Uh, Sir, maybe you should sit back down. You don’t look so good.” The kid’s voice is normal, a regular kid’s voice. Eddie collapses back on the sand. The kid crouches next to him and gives him a concerned once-over, careful not to touch. “Are you alright?”

Eddie manages to shake his head. “I was dead,” he says, unsure why the truth spills out of him so easily. “I guess I got better? It hurts like hell.”

The kid sits down next to Eddie, a fair foot of space between them, and stares out at the sea. Eddie is about to say something about the fucking weather, when the kid puts the turtle between them and speaks. “Name’s Jake,” he says. “I died a bunch of times. There are worlds where I die more than once. It’s something you never quite get used to.”

Eddie stares, for once at a loss for words.

Jake smiles. “Magic is funny business. Especially the magic of entire worlds, all tied up into stories and songs and destinies. I met a very evil, very smart train once that tried to murder me and my friends. We defeated it with a very bad joke.”

The ocean ahead of them is roiling with the promise of the tide. Eddie feels like there’s something else underneath, a horror just waiting to jump out at him. He turns to Jake once more, trying to process the words coming out of the kid’s mouth. “A train?”

“The point,” Jake says, “is not the train. It’s a decrepit, high tech monorail with a consciousness that likes murder-suicide a little too much, but it’s also a children’s book character named Charlie. Things are complicated.”

Eddie nods, understanding lost on him. “Right. What things?”

Jake makes a sweeping gesture. “All things. Life. The universe. Magic. The point is the joke. The point is we won because we didn’t follow the damn rules, not really.”

“You bent them,” Eddie says, “you bastardized the rules so much that they ended up defeating themselves.”

Jake nods. He picks up a handful of sand and watches it run through his fingers. He uses the other hand to rap the turtle on the shell, just like Eddie had done the first time they met. The turtle comes out and looks up at Jake reproachfully.

THIS IS YOUR PART. LET ME SLEEP.

Jake snorts. “Alright, alright. Not like we can do anything about it, you log.” He looks at Eddie, hand still resting on the turtle’s shell. “He’s been dead, too. Very recently, in fact. Choked on a galaxy or two.”

Eddie nods, very carefully. “Uh huh, yes, he mentioned that.” Thunderclouds build on the horizon, thick and inky, and the wind picks up enough to draw goosebumps on Eddie’s skin. He hugs his knees and looks at Jake. The kid seems at once wistful and amused, strangely timeless. If the turtle is a god, this kid is something even beyond that, and yet, also human. Eddie’s earlier fear comes back like a punch to the gut.

“As fun as it is talking to you,” Jake says, eyes on the horizon, “I didn’t come here just to chat. My… family... and I, we’re trying to save someone who is very important to us. He’s a very good man, got me killed a couple of times, but definitely has his heart in the right place. All he ever wanted was to live his life. And that’s fair, but sometimes you’re being called to do greater things.”

Eddie sighs. “Like us, with Pennywise. Something brought us together so we could defeat it.”

“Sort of like that, sure.” Jake sounds a little dismissive of their massive fucking sacrifice and anger starts to build in Eddie’s aching chest. They sacrificed decades, and some of them their entire lives. That’s not a small thing. It’s not a fair trade, not even for the safety of the world, if some little punk is going to disrespect him like this.

Jake laughs. “Hey, hey now, don’t worry, I’m not dismissing what you guys suffered. It’s just that the spider queen was such a small part of this whole story, she barely ranked a mention from the Crimson King.”

Eddie’s confusion must show on his face, because Jake laughs again. “Oh, man, yeah, okay. I’m gonna try to explain it in small words - you’re not the first version of you to die fighting Pennywise, who was actually in her real form a terrifying alien spider who was going to eat the entire world. There’s a you who got his whole arm ripped off trying to save Richie and Bill. It was pretty gruesome, I would not recommend it.”

Eddie shudders. The wind is very cold now and the clouds seem much closer. He can see something in the waves, moving against the tide, boiling underneath the surface.

“There are… so many worlds. But all of them, no matter how big or weird or awful, converge on a single point. That’s the tower. It’s like… have you ever seen the Neverending story? It’s the last thing standing, the last tiny spec of reality when everything else goes under.”

Eddie actually had seen that movie several times, and for some reason it’s always terrified him. The whole swamp sequence broke his heart and wasn’t there a big, ancient turtle god in that one? He remembers that Richie hated that movie with a passion, probably because he couldn’t watch it without crying.

“The Crimson King is basically an asshole who thinks if he destroys god, he can rule what’s left of the universe. It’s, uh, let’s say probably not the greatest plan ever, but he’s gotten very good at what he does.” Jake narrows his eyes at the horizon, starting to talk a little faster. Like they’re running out of time. “The tower isn’t without its defenses. There are guardians who protect it. There are twelve of them, all connected to keystone worlds, and this guy,” Jake points at the turtle, “this guy is one of them. Or was.”

Jake is clearly anxious to get this over with and his anxiety translates to Eddie. He’s readying himself to run.

“Long story short, because you died when the monster did, it’s your turn to guard the beam and, uh, you need to get the fuck up right now.” Jake is scrambling for the turtle and holds a hand out to Eddie to get him up on his feet. “Come on, there are things in that ocean that want to murder us in very creative ways and I don’t have my gun on me.”

There’s a strange reverberation when Jake says gun, like the word is itself a living, breathing thing. Eddie can’t imagine what kind of gun a child like Jake would use, but he sure doesn’t ever want to see it. Better to live in ignorance than die enlightened. He hasn’t actually had enough time to process the part where he’s some sort of guardian now, but if it keeps him alive long enough to see Richie again, he’ll take the fucking deal.

The storm breaks over them like a tidal wave with punishing winds and needling rain, the sudden cold tearing at Eddie’s skin like sandpaper. Jake is tugging him toward a sloping dune, covered in tall grass, that promises some kind of shelter. Eddie’s heart is beating out of his chest and his breath comes in short, painful gasps.

They’re running sluggishly, wet sand sucking at their heels, when a door suddenly appears about two hundred feet in front of them, and Jake yells, “Even odds that’s a way out, let’s go.”

Behind them, Eddie can hear an ominous clicking sound.

+

Richie is losing his mind. He’s talking to nothing, doing voices to keep himself from going utterly insane with loneliness. Time and space have lost all meaning. He’s thinking of Eddie, remembering every moment they had. It’s not much. Eddie and him barely even saw puberty before they were both dragged out of Derry and forgot everything important.

Richie remembers forgetting. He knew he was in danger of it, because he wasn’t an idiot. So he wrote himself a letter every day before bed. This is the boy you can’t forget, his name is Eddie and you care about him. Derry is a fucked up place. Monsters are real. He’d read it in the morning, and it would spark recognition, but not everything and not all at once. It worked for a week. After that, he just thought it was some kind of story he was writing.

He lost the paper a few months in and never looked back.

Though that’s not entirely true, is it? Because Eddie was always there at the back of his mind and the whole entirety of his heart. He figured out he was gay, again, much later, way into college when a fratboy blew him at a party because they were both high and Richie made him laugh. From this, Richie took only that he liked it, but couldn’t figure out why it bothered him anyway. Fratboy took it all with surprising grace and gave him the number of a therapist Richie never called.

The jokes though, they stayed. The voices, too. He was good at being someone else and it never occurred to him that this might be because he never knew himself. Not who he actually was. He was a version of himself frozen in time. No, not frozen. Extracted. He was the version of himself he would have been without ever meeting Eddie, without the Losers, without Pennywise, but stuck there somehow with no way to get better. No way to grow up.

He was trauma-locked.

Richie screams at the void, screams himself raw except his throat never goes sore and his chest doesn’t hurt. He’s stuck again, now with nothing but his memories, nothing but the person he is. It’s awful.

“What’s the point of this? Huh? What are you trying to teach me?” He yells until the words stop having any meaning.

And then suddenly, there is a door.

Richie doesn’t trust it. He tries to walk toward it and his position doesn’t change. He cannot move closer, or turn away. The door is always at the same spot, haunting him. It opens with a creak and through it steps a man who looks vaguely familiar, dark hair, fine features, something delicate about the way he holds himself.

Richie recognizes the face. He can’t quite believe it. “Stan?”

Stan smiles at him, a little tight, like he’s about to give Richie terrible news about his health. “Hey, Richie.”

“Hey, Richie? Stan, what the actual fuck. You’re dead.”

Stan sighs. “Yeah, I am.”

Richie gapes, mouth open and heart beating stupidly fast. He’s suddenly feeling his body again for real, breath harsh, skin prickling, vision blurred at the edges. “Does that mean I… you know.” He makes a cut-throat gesture.

Stan laughs. “Oh, oh no. Actually, you’re very alive. They just needed to hold you somewhere. This place is like… a buffer.”

Richie looks around at the bright nothing. “That’s… pretty accurate. Jeez, what the fuck.”

Stan produces a shotgun from somewhere and shoves the weapon at Richie. “Hold that,” he says, as he looks down on an honest to god clipboard. “You’re going to need it.”

“I don’t know how to use that,” he says, holding the gun delicately with two hands.

“You’ll figure it out,” Stan says. He smiles sadly and steps aside so Richie can reach the door. “Eddie’s right through there, and when you get there, please tell him I’m sorry.”

Richie frowns. “Sorry for what?”

Stan grimaces and puts a hand on Richie’s shoulder, pushing him forward with irresistible force. “For making him take my place,” Stan says as he pushes Richie all the way through the door. Richie stumbles into a hurricane.

+

This is how the world ends.

A tower stands at the center of everything. It crumbles to dust, until nothing but a single grain of sand remains. But the grain of sand is a seed, and from it springs a rose.

This is how the world begins.


	6. Not Your Beach Episode

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check out [the fantastic art](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKStBZYXUAAuwrA.jpg:large) that [pngdraws](https://twitter.com/pngdraws) made for me!

Richie can’t breathe. After the void, this cacophony of noises and howling, whipping wind is pushing him to his knees. He grips the gun tighter and tries to see through rain turning his glasses into a thousand tiny prisms.

“Eddie,” he yells, for lack of any better options. His voice is rough from either disuse or overuse, depending on whether the void stuff was real and he just didn’t feel it, or it was all a dream. Fear clamps down on his chest and he feels his heart beat in the arteries at his throat, painful and real. “Eddie, where are you?”

The answer is a myriad of clicking sounds that remind Rich of watching Star Ship Troopers with a bunch of drunk fratboys. He’d rather take the fratboys than the bugs right about now, but his luck is not that good. The sea is boiling, disgorging ugly, kid-sized, lobster-like creatures that make Richie’s skin crawl. There’s so much noise he can’t hear clearly, but they seem to be uttering word-like sounds.

Richie forces himself up, using the shotgun as a crutch. Looking at what’s coming for him, he should probably get acquainted with the gun as quickly as possible, but his shots are all verbal, maybe occasionally alcoholic.

“Richie, you absolute moron, what are you doing?!” He hears Eddie and suddenly he can breathe again. He whips around and Eddie is there, waving at him frantically. “Come here, before they see you. Oh my god, get a move on.”

Richie is not stupid, he does as he’s told, stumbling foot over hand toward the grassy slope. Eddie catches him, drags him behind the dune and pushes him into the sand. Richie has never been so afraid and so excited and so turned on at the same time, and he knows, he knows they’re in danger, because Eddie has that Pennywise look on his face, the one that says “I can’t believe what’s happening but it’s definitely going to kill us”. He can’t help grinning though, because this is Eddie and he’s real and alive and here. Eddie’s dirty and covered in old blood, most of it his own, and he looks like he’s about to collapse, but he’s alive.

Richie reaches up to cup Eddie’s jaw. “You’re alive.” He can barely hear himself over the sound of the storm, but he knows it’s the soppiest voice he’s ever done, and it’s his own.

Eddie stares at him wide-eyed. “I… what?! Yes, sure, I’m alive, but we’re about to be eaten by lobstrosities and our only help just fucking vanished into thin air. This is not the time to have feelings, alright.”

Eddie is totally having feelings, Richie can tell, and all of them are terror. “I brought a gun,” he says, and isn’t quite sure where it is. Eddie’s face is going bug-eyed, balls-to-the-wall crazy.

“You brought a gun? Where is it? Oh my god, Richie, a pocket pistol is not going to be any fucking help here. That’s barely any good for shooting yourself in the head from your temple.”

Richie burst out laughing despite himself. “I- it’s a big one, actually. Like, so big. I must have dropped it when I started running.”

Eddie, close enough for Richie to see the pulsing vein at his temple, vehemently lectures with his entire body. “You dropped the gun,” he shouts, “you dropped. The gun. The only thing that’s going to fucking- you know what? Never mind. I’m gonna fix it, because clearly neither one of us can be fucking trusted not to get ourselves killed.”

Eddie looks around frantically, then looks back at Richie. There’s a small smile twitching at the corner of his lips. He darts down, smacking their mouths together with a little too much force, and Richie doesn’t even have time to react before Eddie leans back, pats Richie on the cheek twice and pushes himself off of Richie.

“Stay down, don’t get yourself killed while I’m not here.”

Richie snorts. “So not like you, then?”

Eddie gives him the finger. “You’re a colossal asshole, do you know that?”

+

Art done by the amazing [pngdraws](https://twitter.com/pngdraws)

+

The rain is cold enough to be deeply unpleasant, but Eddie doesn’t mind as much as before. Richie is here. Richie is here, they’re both alive, and Eddie is going to find that fucking gun. Shouldn’t be hard, he can see the door from here and there’s something dark at the foot of it. Probably the gun. It looks large enough to be useful, and Eddie hopes it’s a little more than a simple hunting rifle. Military issue would be nice, but anything that packs a punch will do.

Earlier, after trying the door for several minutes and nearly getting eaten by lobstrosities, Jake had come to the conclusion that this door was very specific in its requirements and probably only opened in one direction. That was about half an hour before Richie tumbled out of it, and twenty nine minutes before Jake and the turtle just disappeared into thin air.

The last thing Jake said to him was “kill with your heart, beam guardian”, because why the fuck not.

Eddie is going to strangle that kid if he ever sees him again. He’s certainly going to make turtle soup from their magical asshole friend. That motherfucker is so damn unhelpful, it might as well be a shiny paperweight. The wind tears Eddie’s breath right out of his lungs and pushes him back into the dune. Eddie pushes back and wins, every step a victory. He’s surprised that his wounds don’t start gushing blood from the exertion. It certainly hurts like they are. Somehow his body is keeping it all together and he makes it all the way to the magical door.

It’s just a door, looks sort of the same from both sides, frame attached to nothing but air. He tries to open it but the handle doesn’t move so much as a hair’s breadth. It feels cold and solid in his grip, completely immovable.

“Figures,” he says under his breath. Eddie looks down to find the gun Richie was talking about and it’s right there. Good news, it’s a matte black monstrosity meant for… well, shooting things from rather close range. It’s a weapon he’s used before, maybe. He’s not entirely sure because some of his memory loss goes beyond Derry, but probably for other, more mundane reasons. And that’s not something he has time for right now.

He grabs the shotgun and the weight of it calms something inside him. He returns to Richie with his back to the chittering mass of lobster monsters. They’re much closer now. Again. If they overrun the door, the dune probably won’t be far behind. They have to find a way out of here before that happens.

Eddie drops down next to Richie, back pressed into the wet sand, shotgun at the ready. He feels wired and ready to do something really stupid, but maybe that’s just because Richie is right there. “I found your gun.”

He can barely hear Richie’s sigh over the noise of the storm. “I don’t think that gun was ever for me,” Richie says.

Eddie nods. “Yeah, no, I don’t think it was. How did you get it? Did the turtle magic it up for you?”

Richie turns on his side and leans close enough that Eddie can read the panic in his eyes. “Stan. I think Stan’s ghost gave it to me.”

Eddie considers the possibility. Stan. Jesus fuck. “There’s a very good chance we’re going to die here,” Eddie says, pushing his upper body right up in Richie’s space. He’s so close now he can feel the heat radiating from Richie’s skin. “So I feel like I should tell you something.”

Richie swallows hard. Eddie wants to lick the skin at the base of his throat. “Uh, okay. I’m not sure this is the time for heartfelt confessions, but go ahead.”

Eddie blinks the rain out of his eyes. He wants to see Richie clearly. “I’m pretty sure I’m seriously fucked up, but if there is one thing about me that’s sane and good, it’s you.” He presses his lips to Richie’s and for one glorious second, he forgets everything but this. The kiss deepens despite his best intentions, Richie’s tongue pressing into his mouth like a tentative invader. Eddie’s heart is going a mile a minute. He can still hear the monsters, but for this short moment, they don’t matter. Nothing matters but the way Richie tastes, the sounds he makes, the little tug at Eddie’s shirt where Richie’s hand tries to make its way to bare skin. They don’t have time for this and Eddie manages to pull himself away. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

“That’s, uh, that’s something we should probably talk about later.” Richie stares at him, kiss-swollen lips open in a confused circle. Eddie puts their foreheads together. “Come on, you’re the one who came through the door in the first place. Maybe you can open it again.”

He tugs Richie up by the hand, his other hand holding the gun. If he’s going to be effective with that thing he’s probably going to have to let Richie go, but for now he allows himself the indulgence. Richie’s hand in his feels right, a similar feeling to when he picked up the gun, but much stronger, like a wildfire instead of a candle flame.

+

Beverly Marsh drops a plate.

She’s been drying dishes from their late lunch and smiling at Ben, who is putting away leftovers in neat little tupperware boxes. It’s disgustingly domestic and she should feel something other than the ecstatic, slow-burning high she’s been on since defeating that clown. Her sorrow for lost friends can’t even begin to scratch the surface of that font of joy at her core. She’s finally free. She’s finally home.

The image of Richie and Eddie - Eddie! - fighting for their lives comes unbidden and without warning. One moment, she’s here with Ben, the next it feels like she’s caught in a storm as bad as the one that cost Georgie his life so long ago. She stands a foot or two away from Richie and Eddie as they push and pull at a door that won’t open. Not that it would matter, the door doesn’t lead anywhere, does it?

She hears them before she sees them, a cacophony of insectoid clicking sounds and a low murmur of human-like voices. Questioning voices. They sound almost mournful, almost apologetic, but Bev feels terror down to her bones. She turns to face the onslaught and there must be thousands of the creatures, looking like massive, dog-sized lobsters, sharp claws ready to tear soft flesh to pieces.

Bev snaps back into her body, plate dropping out of the death grip she had on it. It shatters, the noise tearing through their soft afternoon silence. Bev stares at Ben, whose face tells her exactly what she needs to know: he’s seen them, too.

“We need the circle,” she says, and already runs for her phone. She dials Mike and hopes he’s somewhere with reception. She trusts that Ben is doing the same for Bill. The distance is going to fuck with the power, but she knows deep down that it can be enough. This kills monsters, if you believe it. And she does.

Mike picks up. “I know,” he says, sounding out of breath. “I saw.”

Ben and Bev put their phones between them on the coffee table, spaced two feet apart, the same distance between her and Ben. It’s not a perfect circle, it’s not exactly conventional magic, but it’s going to be enough.

“Think about them,” Bev says, “concentrate on them. Give them your strength.”

+

Richie is terrified and so very, very tired. He can hear Eddie breathing hard behind him as Richie tries and fails to find a way to open the door. Eddie has the unenviable task of making sure the lobsters stay where they are. Richie can hear Eddie cursing, but he’s also mumbling something else. Some kind of creed, like maybe that love letter thing marines say to their rifles. It’s a little weird and Richie smiles, but for some reason he can totally imagine Eddie in uniform. Richie swallows and cuts that off at the root, he has no time for dirty fantasies.

That’s when he hears the first shot and whips around to find the lobstrosities much closer than he thought. “Eds, you doing okay there?” His voice is torn from his lips by the wind and Eddie just gives him the finger without turning around. The shotgun goes again, and Richie starts to wonder how many, uh, shots it can fire before they’re out of ammunition. It doesn’t look like it has some kind of big magazine attached to it or anything and really, Richie knows fuck all about guns, but he knows they don’t have a lot of time.

He turns back to the door and tries to look at it like Ben would, Ben who can build shit out of nothing, who sees everything like a problem to solve. The door is wood and looks indoorsy, something you’d expect to find upstairs in a mansion, a glossy finish on dark brown wood that almost looks black in this weather.

Richie runs his hands over the seam between frame and panel. There are no visible hinges so the door opens away from him, which is weird because he’s pretty sure it went the other way from the void. Alright. Magical door, magical rules of carpentry and physics. The handle is a brazen statement, ornate and flowery in a way that looks both oppressive and haunting. It’s a handle that goes with ghost stories and locked murder rooms. It looks well-used though, almost soft to the touch. Richie runs his fingers over it, then across the wood closer to the frame. He can’t feel anything there, but something tells him that’s the best place to put pressure, the weakest link.

Another voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Mike says, “it will open when it is satisfied.” Because Mike is their mystical guy, the one who believes in all this magical shit, and if anyone knows about magical doors, well, Mike’s the one, right?

So, how do you satisfy a magical door? True love’s kiss? No, because there’s been quite a lot more kissing than he thought there would be at the start of this very long day. Richie huffs a stupid, happy laugh because no matter what, they’re here together, him and Eddie. As it should be.

Two more shots and Eddie’s yelling at the big fucking lobsters to get fucked if they know what’s good for them. The lobsters don’t seem to get the message, because there’s another shot following some really inventive cursing. Richie is starting to think that maybe they’d be better off running far, far away, and waiting for the tide to sweep these creatures back into the ocean. But he doesn’t know anything about where they are and it’s quite possible there is nowhere to run.

Richie yelps when Eddie backs into him. “Please tell me you know how to get that door open,” Eddie says over his shoulder. “Because this little shotgun has just about run out of juice.”

+

Eddie can feel Beverly’s hand on the barrel, can almost see her standing right beside him, channeling all her strength into the weapon. “I do not aim with my hand,” she says, and Eddie speaks the words with her, with one of two little changes. They’re opposites and the same, Bev and he. “She who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her mother. I aim with my eyes.”

Boom. Two lobstrosities explode in a mess of goo and chitin, splattering their mess all over the sand and the other creatures. The frontline skitters back, screeching and chattering, their inquisitive half-language bursting from them in outraged gasps. If the gun was fully loaded, they have less than a minute of this back and forth before the lobstrosities overrun this position.

“I do not shoot with my hand. She who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her mother.” Eddie ends on “father” a half-second later. The other way around, he doesn’t think either of them could ever forget. Those faces, those people, are indelibly edged into their hearts and minds and souls. “I shoot with my mind.”

Boom. He curses at the creatures, makes himself as big as he can, tries to display dominance in the most animal fashion he can think of. It helps that he’s furious, always so angry, like the well-spring in his soul is white-hot rage at all times. The lobstrosities are unimpressed, but so far not smart enough to realize that he’s just one dude with a gun, against thousands of them. He doesn’t actually stand a chance at holding them back for any length of time, never mind when his ammo runs out.

“I do not kill with my gun,” Bev whispers. “She who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her mother.” There’s a pause and Eddie curses as he shoots one, two, three more times. The waves of new lobstrosities are never ending.

“I kill with my heart.”

Click. The gun’s done and he’s one second away from a massive panic attack when something else clicks into place. Eddie can’t believe he didn’t think of it before, can’t believe he’s holding an empty fucking shotgun in his useless hands.

“Oh my god,” he yells, “seriously?”

But Bev is still there and he can see the outline of her hand on the gun, other hand reaching back to someone, probably Ben. Oh. They’re all here.

It’s Bill who whispers in his other ear. “This kills monsters, if you believe it.”

He just has to believe. He backs into Richie and that is both reassurance and motivation. If he dies, that’s bad, but if Richie dies… that’s just not going to happen. He reaches for Richie’s hand and turns around.

“I’m going to need you to reach out and take Mike’s hand,” Eddie says, very quickly. “No questions, no doubt, you have to believe that he’s there alright? Can you do that for me?”

Richie raises one sarcastic eyebrow. “No, Eddie, I don’t think I can do that. That’s just too much, I mean, the alien clown was one thing, and you coming back to life, and Stan’s ghost, but how could Mike possibly be here right now?”

Eddie really wants to smack him, but actually he has no hand free for that. Richie reaches out and grabs at thin air, clearly catching something and Eddie can feel the power inside him focus. He puts the gun on the door, just above the handle, angled so it’ll blow the lock to tiny little pieces. The gun is loaded, he tells himself. It’s loaded. There’s one more cartridge, just enough to save them.

Richie squeezes his hand and Eddie pulls the trigger.

+

Beverly falls backward with surprising force and nearly hits her head on a small, decorative flower pot. Ben rushes over to her and touches her shoulder softly. He’s still wary about presuming too much, he doesn’t yet know that his touch is always welcome. His hands are shaking and Beverly smiles up at his concerned face.

From the coffee table, Bill and Mike are yelling confused questions through shitty phone speakers. “Bev, are you okay? Did it work? Did anyone see what happened?”

Beverly scoops up the phones and holds them so Bill and Mike can see. “We’re fine. I think we got kicked out when the door opened.”

Bill frowns. “Are you s-s-sure?”

Beverly bites her lower lip. Her husband hated when she did that, always said it made her look unprofessional. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

It’s Ben who finally asks the question they’re all thinking about. “Does that mean Eddie is alive?”

Guilt rears its ugly head as Beverly thinks about her last conversation with Richie. They knew he was doing something stupid and dangerous, they just didn’t think it was going to work. Derry has taken so much from all of them - Beverly hates it with all of her soul, with her body and her blood. But sorrow had followed her out of that town, into the real world, and maybe Derry itself isn’t what scares her.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she says, carefully, deliberately. Her thoughts are falling into place as she speaks. “I don’t know what we just did or how we’re capable of doing anything like this, if the clown is dead. When I talked to Richie, I think… I think he wanted to die. I told him I couldn’t be there, I told him he had to do this alone. Because I was afraid.”

She takes Ben’s hand, squeezes it tightly. His other arm wraps around her like a lifesaver. “But I’m not afraid anymore. I think I needed to leave to prove that I could. And now Richie and Eddie are back there all alone.”

Mike groans. “We have to go back.”

Beverly swallows the fear that rises in her throat. “I think so. I think this isn’t over, not yet, and they’re going to need us there, for real.”

“Alright,” Bill says. “I’m going to t-talk to Audra. I think it’s t-time you all met her.”

An unpleasant blush spreads across Beverly’s neck and face. “Are you sure about that, Bill? Does she understand who we are, what we, uh, what we mean to you?”

Bill actually has the audacity to grin. “I think you’re g-going to love her.”

Ben’s chin is resting on Beverly’s shoulder and when he whispers, she’s the only one who can hear him. “If she’s anything like you, I’m sure it will be okay.” He places the softest kiss on her cheek.

Beverly smiles. “Richie is going to be so pissed we let him do all the heavy lifting by himself.”

+

Richie is ecstatic. He’s beaten and bruised, bleeding from cuts and scrapes all over, every muscle in his body screaming with exertion, and he has never been this happy. Going through the door, several of the lobstrosities nearly got them, snapping at their heels. There’s a deep gash in Richie’s left calf that’s probably going to need stitches.

But Eddie is okay. Eddie is warm and solid and breathing on top of him, grinning like an idiot, body as whole as it can be under the circumstances.

“Ouch,” Richie says, his hands coming to rest on Eddie’s sides. He wants to run them all over him.

Eddie leans down, nipping at his lips, and Richie laughs. “Jesus fuck, I can not believe any of that just happened.”

Eddie shakes his head. “Don’t say that, or someone is going to come and take it all back. I am not going to keel over dead because you said something stupid.”

Richie snorts. “That’s totally how I’m going to die, saying something incredibly stupid.”

Eddie growls a little and kisses him, hard and deep and fast. “Not today,” he says, coming up for a breath. “Not today.”

If it were up to him, Richie could stay here in the monster cave forever, just making out with Eddie and being so goddamn alive. But Eddie gets distracted and he looks a little bit haunted every time he looks around. There’s a ball of light marking where Eddie’s body was, and this is technically his grave, so Richie figures that would make things a bit weird.

“You want to take this to the an actual bed?” Richie says, giving Eddie a filthy look that promises so much more to come. Heh.

Eddie laughs, rubbing the back of his neck almost like he’s embarrassed. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah, why don’t we do that?”

Despite his aching body, Richie has never stood up so fast. He offers Eddie a hand up and pulls him so hard Eddie staggers into him. Richie wraps Eddie in a quick, tight hug and promises, “I’ve got you, babe.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “I have no idea why I even like you.”

Richie laughs. “Yes, you do.”

At that, Eddie looks at him, eyes dark and full of fire, and he says: “Yes, I really do.” He smacks Richie on the ass, hard. “Now let’s get out of here so I can show you how much.”

Richie grins as he watches Eddie go, noticing that Eddie’s ears have taken on a faint reddish hue, visible even down here in the shadows.

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Dark Tower references: both Bev and Eddie might be latent gunslingers, in another world, another time. Who knows? The lobstrosities are lifted wholesale from The Drawing of the Three, as is the beach. Not that I remember the details.
> 
> Eddie's potential military experience may or may not be dragging my decade old Generation Kill feelings.
> 
> We're getting closer to the end, maybe two more chapters, maybe three. We'll see! Come chat with me about these people, I love them a bunch :D


	7. Borderlands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that justifies the rating, take that as you will.

This is a riddle.

An airplane goes down in the small strip of land between two countries. There are over two hundred people on board, all but five of them die instantly. The passengers are citizens of the country the plane departed from, however, the country they were going to does not acknowledge the sovereignty of that country. Politically, it does not exist. The dead are essentially stateless. There’s international outrage, of course, people need to be given proper burials.

Choices have to be made. Consequences will be dire. War is on the horizon.

Do you bury the survivors in the first country, the second, or in no man’s land?

+

Eddie has no idea what he’s doing. Being informed was always kind of his thing and oh, boy, the internet is both a godsend and a curse. He spends more time on WebMD than he does on Facebook, but maybe that’s because most of his family is dead and he has no friends.

Well. No friends he remembered two weeks ago, anyway.

The Losers burst back into his life like a pinata filled with childhood trauma and sexual confusion. Although that last one is mostly Richie's fault. Eddie spent the hours up to his death in a constant state of anxiety, arousal, reawakened trauma and utter emotional disarray. For twenty seven years, he hasn’t loved anything the way he loves the Losers and the absolute, disgusting reach of the feeling, the way it presses down on his chest like a panic attack, makes him want to run far, far away.

Standing in the Barrens, Richie touches his hand, soft, tentative, a request for permission. The corner of Eddie’s mouth twitches. “Are you sure you want to be seen holding hands with me?”

Richie looks offended, as if this is about Eddie and not about what Derry does to people who are different. Derry is not an easy place to be… whatever they are now. Eddie doesn’t even know if he’s really properly alive anymore, although he feels much more like a person than he has in the cavern under the city. In the harsh light of day, he’s filthy and bruised, but whole enough. Alive enough.

Eddie turns his palm and grasps Richie’s hand, absolutely certain of the rightness of it. Let them come. Let them try what they did with that poor kid. Eddie stabbed Henry Bowers in the chest. He killed… he killed a clown. Almost, anyway. Close enough. He can take what Derry has to throw at him.

Richie brings their joined hands to his face and presses a soft kiss to Eddie’s knuckles. “You’re going to need a crowbar to pry me off you for the foreseeable future.”

That… Eddie blushes; he doesn’t know what to say to that except: “Jesus, Richie.”

They walk slowly, leaning on each other, and Eddie feels a warmth spread in his chest that has nothing to do with magical healing. He’s happy. Weirdly, surprisingly happy. They both smell like the sewers, they’re still damp and dirty and injured in a myriad of small ways. He literally just died and came back to life.

Apprehension makes him slow down the closer they get. “Richie,” Eddie says, some two blocks away from Mike’s apartment above the library. “I have to warn you, I… I’ve never done anything like this.”

Richie stops in his tracks. He looks at Eddie with a soft, tragic smile that makes Eddie wary of what comes next. He's not emotionally equipped for any more heavy truths. And Richie looks like he’s about to give Eddie’s eulogy. “Anything like what?” Richie’s voice sounds weirdly thin, like the scared child he never was. Richie has always been the one to pretend and bluster. This is new, and terrifying.

Eddie swallows hard and tries to say something pithy, but what comes out is raw and clunky. “Wanting… someone. Wanting to do filthy things with them… with you.”

Richie’s face is a study in opposites, like he can’t decide whether he’s horny or moved, going to burst out laughing or into big, ugly tears. Eddie can relate. He’s just about done with having feelings that push and pull him in ten different directions at once. He’s ready for things to be easy now, thank you. Or at least easy enough so he can breathe. Eddie smiles and Richie leans down to kiss him, soft and sweet and heartrending.

A woman with a small, chubby dog walks past them and mutters something nasty under her breath. Eddie wants to give her the finger or worse, but Richie still has Eddie’s hand and, really, is she even worth the effort?

Richie drags him forward again and Eddie lets himself be led.

+

Richie needs a shower and he needs to tear Eddie’s clothes off and make sure he’s goddamn whole and going to live a long, boring, happy life. Thankfully, both of those things can easily be accomplished in Mike’s tiny bathroom. They’ve both been too silent, too emotional, and he realizes that doing anything more than kissing right now might bite them in the ass later, when they’re stable enough to have feelings about this adrenaline induced haze.

But Richie is also all out of fucks to give and future Richie is just going to have to deal.

“I want…” Richie starts, but can’t quite put it into words. He wants all the things. Everything Eddie is willing to give. “I think I’d like to shower with you.” And god, what is he, an emotionally constipated pre-teen? Technically, parts of him never stopped being a thirteen year old idiot, so yeah, okay. Sure.

Eddie’s eyes are huge. He nods and starts to take his shirt off, but seems to have difficulty raising his arms. A freaking stab wound through your chest, even all magically healed, is probably gonna do that to you.

“Fuck,” Eddie says, one arm up, his head muffled by blood-soaked cloth. Richie reaches out to tug the offending garment off, but Eddie flinches. “I can do it,” he says, a little fire back in his voice. “I’m not…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Richie has an idea what he was going to say. He’s not a child, or someone who needs to be coddled. He’s a capable adult who can do shit for himself.

Richie grins and shakes his head. “This is definitely the sexiest strip-tease I’ve seen to date. A+, will come again.”

Eddie snorts. “You haven’t even come the first time.” Then he finally manages to pull the shirt off and grins. “Yet.”

Most of Richie’s blood goes south and heat pools in his belly. Eddie looks positively edible. He’s more defined than Richie thought and that’s not entirely surprising because a health nut like Eddie probably goes to the gym, unlike Richie who is very proud of having paid for an entirely unused gym membership for the last twenty years or so. Richie reaches out to touch the skin around the angry pink scar that covers most of the center of Eddie’s chest. It’s right above his heart. Richie’s fingers begin to tremble and he looks up into Eddie’s face to find him biting his lower lip.

“Hey,” Richie says, smiling.

Eddie smiles back. “Hey.” He’s undoing the button on his pants. Richie fights the urge to look away, modesty has left the building. Then Eddie drops his pants and pushes his boxer briefs down after only hesitating for half a second and modesty has fucked all the way off.

Richie licks his lips.

Eddie stares at him and makes an impatient hand gesture. "Quid pro quo, motherfucker."

Richie complies as fast as he possibly can, tearing his clothes off and dropping them in a heap that Eddie gives the stink eye. Richie could not care less about the tidiness of his clothes in this moment because Eddie is putting his hand on the back of Richie’s neck and pulling him in for a searing kiss that melts Richie’s bones and turns his muscles to mush.

Richie doesn’t know where to put his hands. He wants to run them all over Eddie’s body, touch every inch of him. He settles for the hips. He’s tempted to pull Eddie impossibly closer, just press them both together until he can’t tell where Eddie ends and Richie begins. But there’s something they’re supposed to be doing.

Richie pulls away just enough to be able to speak. “Uh,” he says, “what are we…”

Eddie puts their foreheads together, he’s breathing hard and fast, like he’s been running. “Shower. And I swear to god if I had known kissing you would make you monosyllabic I would have done it a long time ago.”

Richie huffs a laugh and turns Eddie toward the curtain. “Ladies first,” he says.

Eddie slaps his shoulder. “Down, boy. It’s amazing how you’re even less funny when all your blood has left your brain. You’re the anti-funny. A black hole for fun.”

Richie snorts. “I’ll show you a hole, if you want.”

“Goddammit, Richie, water. Now.”

“As you wish,” Richie says, exactly the way Cary Elwes would have.

Eddie tenses and looks back at him. “Are you… quoting The Princess Bride at me?”

Richie laughs and places a kiss on Eddie’s neck, because he fucking can. “Inconceivable,” he mutters into Eddie’s skin. Eddie just shakes his head and steps into the shower. Richie follows as if drawn by magnets.

Just as he closes the curtain, ice cold water hits Richie at the small of the back and he yelps, jumping forward into Eddie’s space. Eddie is giggling, hand still on the valve. Richie is crowding Eddie against the far corner, the furthest place from the evil faucet. He’s bracketing Eddie with his arms, using all his height to seem imposing. Eddie isn’t impressed.

“You don’t scare me, Trashmouth.”

Richie grins, leaning down to take Eddie’s earlobe between his teeth. He tugs a little and gets a lovely shudder in response. “I think I do,” he whispers into Eddie’s ear. “Just a little bit.”

Eddie moans, bucking into Richie in small, aborted movements. He’s still somehow in control of himself, of course he is. Richie wants to shatter Eddie’s walls, take him apart, make him forget his own name. It’s not a plan and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but Richie drops to his knees. He looks up, asking for permission, because he hasn’t touched Eddie’s dick yet and he really fucking wants to.

Eddie looks… Eddie looks horrified and Richie’s blood freezes.

+

Eddie hasn’t been this fucking hard in his life, and Richie is doing it to him with a frankly insulting ease. Richie is boxing him in and instead of triggering some kind of fight or flight reflex, it makes Eddie feel safe, warm and wanted. Jesus Christ. Eddie is on fire, all nerve endings popping with stimuli. Little shocks of pleasure course through his body. It’s a struggle to keep himself from climbing all over Richie, pressing himself into all the hollows of Richie’s body. It’s where he belongs, there never was another option for him and that’s both a revelation and not at all surprising.

Then Richie drops to his knees.

Eddie thinks, “I’m about to have my cock sucked,” with a sense of wonder, and then his vision whites out and he hears the croaking voice of the leper.

“How bout a blowjob, Eddie?”

He knows, he KNOWS, it’s not real, that this is his head vomiting up nearly three decades of internalized bullshit. He knows this. He stops breathing, his hands are shaking and he bites his lips hard to stop himself from screaming.

Richie is getting up, careful not to touch him, but Eddie can feel him hover. He’s not going to look at Richie and watch the disappointment bloom on his face, because Eddie is fucked up enough as it is. He can’t handle whatever Richie is figuring out about him right now.

Richie is not touching him but he isn’t leaving either, and maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe Eddie’s going to die again right here, right now. “Eddie,” Richie says, and he’s so fucking careful it makes Eddie furious. Why isn’t he angry about Eddie fucking up their moment? Eddie shakes his head, trying to get Richie to give up and just leave. He’s pressed into the corner of the shower stall and it’s just like the Niebolt house again, frozen with terror.

“Eddie,” Richie says softly, “hey, uh, can you look at me? Please?”

Eddie swallows hard and nods, looking up. Richie looks devastated. His mouth is pink from all the kissing they’ve done, his hair is frizzy from the water vapor, and his eyes… his eyes are red-rimmed, scared and guilty. “Eddie, can I touch you? I promise I’ll stop if you’re uncomfortable, okay?”

Eddie nods again.

Richie reaches out, running his hand softly, carefully, over Eddie’s shoulder, up to his neck. He’s pulling Eddie in, and somehow the lock clicks open and Eddie sinks into the embrace. They’re hugging. Eddie immediately feels better, even though his brain is still berating him about messing this up.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie sighs into Richie’s neck. “I really want to, it’s just-” he tries to get the words out, but all he can manage is a garbled huff. Because how do you say that when you were thirteen years old a magical clown took something you didn’t even understand about yourself just yet and turned it ugly and filthy and disgusting?

Richie squeezes him, just tight enough to mean he’s here, he’s listening. He knows, maybe, exactly what that’s like. Because Eddie has seen Richie’s comedy shows, and the Richie Tozier everyone knows is not the Richie Tozier standing in this shower with him. Eddie laughs, a rough, blubbery sound that’s not at all a sob.

Richie runs his fingers through Eddie’s hair, and he wants to be annoyed at being pet like a dog, but it makes every muscle in his back unlock, so he’s going to take it. “We never have to do anything more than this,” Richie whispers, “I’m so fucking delighted you’re here, there’s nothing else I need except that you’re happy.”

This is ridiculous. Eddie pushes Richie off, enough to really look at his face. The guilt. Jesus Christ, Richie is as bad as he is, maybe worse, because Eddie’s just afraid of sex, but Richie is afraid of himself. Eddie frowns and shakes his head.

“You’re not gonna do that,” Eddie hisses, and Richie’s eyes go wide with surprise. “You’re not going to stand here and roll the fuck over like a kicked puppy because you think you owe me something. Jesus. We can both be fucking adults about the fact that I just saw a goddamn leper offering me a blowjob for a dollar because I have endless depths of clown related trauma, just like you do.”

Richie blinks owlishly, and then he starts laughing softly, but with a hysterical edge. It looks like a slow motion trainwreck, or one of those videos of a hydraulic press crushing something that should not be crushed. Eddie sighs and very deliberately pushes Richie to the other side of the shower stall, right under the lukewarm spray of water. He reaches for the store brand body wash without taking his eyes off Richie, whose face is still a full on horror show.

Eddie pushes the bottle at Richie. “Here,” he says. He’s trying to sound confident, like this isn’t the scariest thing he’s ever done, clown included both times. He turns around and drops his head. “Can you wash my back for me?”

Richie lets out a sound that punches Eddie right in the chest.

+

Richie is still trying to process the words leper and blowjob in the same sentence, and thinks, Paul Bunyan. It’s Eddie’s Paul Bunyan. They’re both so fucked, there probably isn’t going to be any fucking - maybe not ever, but certainly not any time soon. Eddie looks, fuck, he looks glorious and hot like the center of the sun as he pushes Richie around as if it’s nothing.

Richie takes the bottle offered to him and is ready to do what he’s told, when Eddie turns around and Richie sees his back properly for the first time. It’s a scar on Eddie’s chest; it’s a fucking crater on his back. There’s ridged scar tissue everywhere and it looks like a dog’s breakfast. Richie can’t help a small gasp - it’s not that it’s ugly, but it must still hurt. He traces the edge of it with his finger tips, trying to figure out if Eddie is okay.

Eddie moans. “Fuck, Rich, what are you doing back there?”

“Uh,” Richie says, “Clown fucked up your back. It’s, uh, it’s not pretty.”

Eddie attempts to look over his own shoulder at his back, contorting himself a little until he pulls a muscle right under the mess of skin and stops. That hurt. Richie can tell from the way Eddie flinches that it must be quite painful, but at least there’s no blood. He’s going to do something very stupid and before ke knows what exactly he thinks he’s doing, he puts his hand on the mark, like a TV preacher healing the pretend sick.

Eddie sighs. “Ahh, asshole, that tickles.”

Richie is staring at his hand. There are tendrils of blue-tinged light weaving between his fingers and a buzzing sound in his brain, like a hundred angry wasps. He can feel the energy from all of his cells migrate to where he and Eddie are connected and okay, that’s fucking weird and terrifying, and he’s not actually paying enough attention to himself to realize he’s about to pass out, but he draws his hand away at the last second.

The buzzing stops. Eddie’s back is not miraculously healed.

But it does look a little less like a meteor shattered Eddie’s spine.

Richie turns Eddie around so they can look at each other, because this is not a moment for talking to the back of someone’s head. He bites his lip, unsure about how to phrase what comes next. “I think,” he says, “I think your turtle friend or maybe Stan gave me some kind of, uh, some kind of healing power. When I touched you just now, there was a light, and your scar looks a little less like hamburger helper.”

Eddie’s eyes are wide and getting wider. “Don’t- fuck, don’t do that again.”

Richie frowns. “Why the fuck not?”

Eddie reaches out and Richie lets him. He runs his finger under Richie’s nose, across the top of Richie’s lips. When he draws back his hand, his finger is thick with blood. “That’s why,” Eddie says, and he’s furious. “I literally just told you that I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself on the altar of my happiness, or my health, or whatever the fuck you think you’re doing. We’re in this together or not at all. Understand?”

And then Eddie pulls him in and kisses him sharply, hungrily, like a man starving and Richie is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Like he’s forgotten the blood, or simply doesn’t care. Richie doesn’t know what to do with that except give himself over and kiss back just as hard. He’s ravenous. They’re both drowning in each other and Richie can’t imagine a better way to go.

+

They do manage, at some point, to actually get cleaned up and dried off. Eddie hasn’t ever felt this kind of need to be close to someone, to touch them, to wrap himself in them until he can feel nothing but Richie, Richie, Richie. His heart is beating fast and he’s so damn hard it’s almost painful. He drags Richie to the bed and lets himself fall, never once letting go of Richie’s hand. He feels wanton and wide open, vulnerable but cared for. It’s so new and so fragile a feeling, he’s unsure it’s possible to contain it in his heart.

Richie just looks at him, and there is such wonder on his face. It makes him younger. This is the Richie Eddie remembers, just taller.

“God,” Richie says, and it sounds like a prayer. “You look so fucking good. Do you know that? Has anyone ever told you?”

Eddie whines and he’s not proud of the way his hips buck. “Shut up and come here,” and he tugs at their joined hands in invitation. The bed creaks ominously as Richie gets on top of it, straddling Eddie’s thighs. Eddie needs more, he needs lips on his, fingers locked together, and he reaches for it all greedily. Richie settles on top of him, arms bracketing Eddie’s head. The weight on him allows Eddie to push himself up, to find some goddamn friction for his aching cock.

“Mhm,” he says, intelligently. “If you don’t move soon I’m going to murder you.”

Richie laughs as he bites Eddie’s lower lip. “Are you going to beat me to death with your big stick?”

Eddie twitches upward involuntarily, their cocks sliding together. “You think you’re hilarious,” he pants out, “but you’re not. You’re, uh… you’re-”

Richie reaches down with his big, dexterous hands and closes his fist around both their dicks. Eddie rolls his hips together with the rhythm of Richie’s breath. “Ahh, god, Richie. Keep… keep doing that.”

Richie’s breath is coming shorter. “I wasn’t, uh, wasn’t going to stop.”

They’re both getting lost in the rhythm, falling apart at the seams. There’s an ache inside Eddie that blooms into an explosion of need. He kisses Richie again, sloppy and open-mouthed. He’s falling apart and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

“Let it go,” Richie gasps out, “let go, Eddie. I’ll catch you.”

Eddie is undone. He’s coming hard, spilling all over both of them and Richie’s hand. “Richie,” he moans, a benediction.

Richie releases Eddie’s softening cock and leans back on his haunches. He’s beautiful. Eddie has never seen anyone so perfect. He reaches out, boneless from his orgasm, and puts his hand on Richie’s. “Together,” Eddie says, “or not at all.”

Richie throws his head back when he comes, saying Eddie’s name like it’s the most precious thing he knows, and then he collapses next to him. He’s clearly too worn out to get up again and get a wash cloth, so Eddie tries to roll out from under him. Richie locks his arm around Eddie. “We can have another shower in the morning,” he says, even though neither of them even know what time of the day it is. Eddie tries to wiggle away half-heartedly, but frankly he’s still a little boneless himself and it’s just come.

He’s going to hate himself for this in the morning, he’s sure, but that’s a problem for future Eddie.

+

Richie opens his eyes.

The first thing he sees is a couple of goddamn lobster monsters and he shrieks. It’s a manly shriek, certainly. He can hear Eddie snickering behind him and that’s good. Eddie is here. Together or not at all, yeah.

“What the actual fuck,” Richie says, just to say something.

Eddie comes to stand beside him. They’re far away from the water and the lobsters look busy with some kind of big, meaty lump. They’re not even close enough to hear the incessant chattering, thank the turtle for small mercies. “I think we’re dreaming,” Eddie says as he takes Richie’s hand. The warmth is immediate and all-encompassing. Okay. A dream, then.

Richie turns when he hears a voice call to him, and this one is actually a bit of a surprise, because this is Bev like he’s never seen her, so that means it’s her dream, too. “Hey,” Richie shouts, waving to her. “What brings you here, Molly Ringwald?”

Bev tackle hugs them. She presses herself between them, pulls them both close. “Fuck,” she says, “I missed you.”

Richie presses a kiss into her hair. “You, too.”

Bev pushes Richie off with a grin. “Aren’t you supposed to be the tough guy, Mr. Trashmouth? What’s with all these feelings?”

Richie laughs and reaches out to pull Eddie into a sideways hug. “Ah, it’s been a long week.” Eddie struggles to get away, and it’s like the slap fights they used to have, which makes Bev laugh.

“Bev,” Eddie says, and he sounds a little wobbly. “It’s good to see you.”

Bev hugs Eddie again, and Richie steps back a bit to give them a little room. He’s staring at the lobsters violating whatever carcass they have dragged onto the beach and hopes to god it’s big enough to keep them busy for a while. As much as this is a dream, he’s pretty sure they can still be hurt here.

Richie feels the new presence before he sees him. He turns around, already sure what he’s going to find and he’s not disappointed. Stan looks good, as nerdy as ever, but put together in a way Richie never quite managed. He couldn’t be anyone else but Stan Uris, and he’s smiling at Richie with that too old, too knowing grin he often had. Stan the Man.

Richie walks forward to hug the fuck out of that boy. They didn’t have the chance earlier and he’s not going to let it pass again.

“Stan, you asshole,” he says as he folds himself around him.

Stan yelps and pats Richie’s back enthusiastically. “Hey, big guy, how did your big heroic moment turn out?”

Richie laughs. “I gave the gun to Eddie. He saved the day.”

That’s when both Eddie and Bev notice that there’s a fourth person here and the yelling drowns out any snarky answer Stan might have given. “Oh my god,” Bev says, “oh my god. Stan. You’re here. Are you- Stan!”

They jump on Richie and Stan and the four of them tumble into the dunes hugging and laughing and maybe crying a little, too. Stan lets them have their moment until they’re well and truly worn out. They all lie on their backs, staring at the sky, hands entangled like the kids on the cover of a coming-of-age novel.

“This isn’t a social call,” Stan says. “I need to tell you about what I did.”

Bev whimpers. “Jesus, Stan, I saw. I don’t have to hear it again.” Richie emphatically agrees with her. They don’t need the gritty details of how their friend killed himself. But Stan sits up and frowns at them, stern, like a teacher about to reprimand his students.

“That’s not what I mean. That was… unfortunate. I didn’t see another way to accomplish what I needed to, and I wasn’t thinking about how it would affect you.” He pauses, grimacing with obvious guilt. “Or my wife.”

Stan licks his lips. “I didn’t forget as much as you guys,” he says, staring off into the distance. “The turtle talked to me in my dreams, and let me tell you he’s an annoying bastard.”

Eddie chuckles. “You can say that again.”

Stan smiles. “I had dreams about taking over for the turtle, about being a guardian. I knew if I returned to Derry I was never going to come back. I couldn’t let that happen - I was happy. The turtle made a mistake. It made me happy. All of you, I know your lives turned out shitty, and I feel a little guilty about that, because I think that’s the turtle, too. Pennywise made you forget, but the turtle made you miserable.”

Richie laughs. “Money can’t buy happiness, I guess.”

Eddie smacks him in the shoulder. “Shut up, let Stan talk.”

Stan smiles at them. “Richie was supposed to tell you I’m sorry,” he says to Eddie, who just looks adorably confused. “Because when I killed myself, the turtle picked another guardian. It needed one of us to die in Derry, and you drew the short straw.”

It’s Bev who shakes her head. “That’s bullshit, Stan. Why kill yourself then? Death here or there, does it matter? You’re dead either way.”

Stan’s smile turns wet and wobbly as his eyes fill with unshed tears. “I told you already,” he says, “I was happy. I had so much to lose. Pennywise would have used that against us. I would have left you all to die to save myself and what I had with Patty. If given the chance, I would have run. None of you have anything you can’t give up but I did. I did.”

Eddie is the one who reaches out to hug Stan and Richie can feel the forgiveness in the gesture. Eddie, out of all of them, had barely had a chance to make peace with himself and his feelings before he died. Richie looks away. It’s a little too much for him. Bev notices and takes his hand. They sit and watch the horizon as Eddie and Stan whisper apologies and acceptance to each other.

After a while, they all just sit with each other, holding hands and occasionally unearthing a memory of their summer, the summer they saved a town and each other. Richie thinks about everything Stan’s said, and it only occurs to him when the beach starts to fade, that he never asked about the most important thing.

If Stan was going to die to be a guardian, just like Eddie, wouldn’t he also have come back to life?

+

Where do you bury the survivors?

+

Richie wakes at 4 am with a headache and a nosebleed and the sense that he needs to take Eddie and get the fuck out.

+

Future Eddie does not hate past Eddie of the night before, but he loathes current Richie, who is busily throwing clothes in a suitcase in the dark. Eddie is sticky, aches in weird and new places, and smells like lavender body wash that’s gone off a little through the night. It’s not quite dawn yet and he doesn’t understand what’s happening, because he’s about 85% sure Richie had the same pleasant dream about their dead friend that Eddie just had.

“What?” Eddie says, and waves at Richie’s general existence.

Richie throws some clothes at his head. “Eddie, I don’t have time to explain, get dressed, or get cleaned up and get dressed after, I’m going to pack our shit up and then we’re getting away from this godforsaken town.”

Eddie blinks. “Uh,” he says. His brain isn’t all there yet and this is not exactly the morning after that he imagined after coming back to life and having the best sex he’s ever had. And that’s a little sad, because he’s not had a lot of sex but a little mutual masturbation shouldn’t rank that high either way, but then not a lot of people are so traumatized by magical happenings that they end up marrying a carbon copy of their own abusive mother, so he’s going to take what he can get.

Which, at this point in time, is a very anxious… Richie.

“Are you still in bed?” Richie says as he passes by with a parka in his hand that Eddie is certain belongs to neither of them.

Eddie’s had quite the experience with letting things happen around and to him, and he’s not in a place to interrogate that today, so he just gets up and trots to the bathroom, clothes in hand. The jeans are his spare pair but the shirt definitely belongs to Richie and is going to look ridiculous on him. Eddie grins. It’s stupid, juvenile, a thing they would have done if they’d dated in high school. He puts it on after a cursory clean up.

Richie is not going to bother tidying anything he’s messed up in Mike’s apartment, and really there’s no easy way to explain the whirlwind that’s hit this place, so Eddie does the sensible thing and simply strips the bed and drops all of it in a corner in the bathroom. Richie is vibrating with nervous energy.

They’re packed up and off in Richie’s rental before six. Eddie doesn’t say anything and just lets Richie drive.

He starts feeling really queasy when they hit Route 2 in the direction of Neibolt Street. Obviously, that’s just because they’re gonna go past what’s technically his grave, but there’s a niggling at the back of his mind that tells him different. He was fine here yesterday. And he’s alive, right? Shouldn’t be bothered by a near miss. His back starts to itch and so do his fingers.

He’s just nervous. Eddie looks over and finds Richie holding the steering wheel in an iron grip, knuckles white as bone. He reaches over to put his hand on Richie’s, imagines he might get him to relax a little, but that’s when he sees his own hand.

It’s transparent.

Jesus. Fuck.

“Richie,” he yells, voice high like a fucking kite, “Richie stop the car.”

To his credit, Richie doesn’t crash them down the cliff edge into the river. The car comes to a screeching halt maybe a hundred yards from the city limits, and Eddie is dead certain that if they had crossed that line at any significant speed, he would have gone poof like a popped balloon.

“Fuck,” Richie says, breathing hard. He’s looking at Eddie, eyes wide with horror, and fucking hell, Eddie is tired of that look. He’s furious.

He gets out and slams the door of the car, it’s not nearly satisfying enough for the rage he feels bubbling out of him. Fuck, fuck, fuck! He walks up to the sign that marks the rest of the world beyond Derry. It’s such an unremarkable place, a piece of road that’s the same on both sides, woods around them looking no different in and out of it. Fuck.

He stops, just right there, feet firmly planted on the Derry side.

Richie runs up to him and gasps, “what the hell is happening?”

Eddie swallows and puts his hand out, he’s already slightly see-through, but when he hits the invisible line that means freedom, his fingers disappear. Richie grabs his arm and pulls him back, like a mother pulling a child away from fire. His hand is fine, it’s whole, and where Richie touches him he’s perfectly opaque.

But when he entwines their fingers and does it again, just to see, his hand flickers and fades and Richie’s grip goes slack because there’s nothing there.

“Richie,” he says, and recognizes his voice from the moment he was impaled by Pennywise. “I think we have a problem.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riddles and jokes do the same thing with assumptions. A lot of the Charlie/Blaine The Mono story in the Dark Tower is about the difference between a riddle and a joke and how Roland's ka-tet can use that to beat the game. If the story is told well, no one questions whether the survivors should be buried anywhere at all.
> 
> I think there's two more chapters in this story, we're almost there, and I'm so grateful for the few people who've come on this ride with me. Let's rock on to the finish line.


	8. Here Comes the Cavalry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is probably the most meta of them all. The last line is a Terminator reference, because that's how we ride in this house.

+

_See the TURTLE of Enormous Girth_  
_On his shell he holds the Earth._  
_His thought is slow, but always kind._  
_He holds us all within his mind._  
_On his back all vows are made;_  
_He sees the truth but mayn't aid._  
_He loves the land and loves the sea,_  
_And even loves a childe like me._  


+

Beverly Marsh drives like a banshee.

It took them only a few hours to get out of Derry and get settled in Ben’s Nebraska home. They spent a lot of their time in bed, certainly, but much of it was just her and Ben being near each other without any pressure to perform. They can simply be. Bev never had that feeling of freedom and safety before and it is slowly healing something so deep down inside her, she never knew to put a name on it.

Now they are on the road again, heading back to the place where all her fears were born. She hates Derry and she hates what Derry made her.

It takes so much longer, going back. It’s like the roads around Derry have turned into a sticky, tar-like substance that keeps them from getting closer, but Bev won’t let that bother her. Her dream on the airplane had left her with the sense that whatever Richie and Eddie need her for, it’s happening very soon.

She pushes down harder on the gas pedal, already way past the speed limit and getting into dangerous territory. It doesn’t feel like they’re going that fast, the trees around them don’t seem to be moving very much at all.

“Fuck,” she mutters, “fuck you to hell, you bitch-ass town.”

Ben snorts in the seat beside her. “Please,” he says, voice rough and gooey from sleep, “tell us how you really feel.”

Bev takes her hand off the wheel to flick some part of Ben she can reach, preferably an ear. He yelps and pulls out of her reach. “Hey, no fair. You’re supposed to watch the road.”

Sighing, Bev throws him a withering glance. “We’re crawling through a swamp, babe. This car is going so slow it might as well be going backwards.”

He looks at the world outside and then the speedometer, twice. “Huh. Weird.”

“I just hope that what’s outside is the real thing because if we’re really going a hundred miles an hour on a regular road, we’re going to be raspberry pancakes in no time flat.”

Ben laughs, even though they both know it’s barely funny. “Then let’s hope,” he says and puts a hand on her thigh. With anyone else, god, this would be somewhere between annoying and disturbingly sexual, but Ben’s hand doesn’t feel like anything but love. When has she become this mushy and romantic?

She reaches down to squeeze his hand and smiles at the road. They’re going to make it. She turns on the radio and it blasts The Power of Love at her. She grins. “Oh yeah, baby, we’re going to Derry.”

+

Panic is a natural state for Richie, has been since he forgot all about being brave and somehow existed anyway in a world that would see him dead if they knew. His whole life outside that one summer was fear. The fear that crawls up his spine now is white hot and ice cold, it’s a volcano and an avalanche. He breathes it and swallows it in sharp, ragged pieces.

Eddie is pacing. “I can’t believe that motherfucking turtle didn’t tell me about this little tidbit. I mean, I can totally believe it because the turtle,” and this part he yells at the sky, “is a massive magical asshole!”

Richie still remembers the way Eddie’s fingers disintegrated in his fucking hand. Fuck. He can feel it, a phantom touch on his palm that keeps disappearing. He… he has to sit down.

Richie’s vision goes fuzzy at the edges and he can’t get air into his lungs. He’s definitely going to sit down. Yep. He’s sitting down right now.

He can hear Eddie, but it’s distant somehow, and that just makes his heart beat fucking faster because Eddie can’t leave him again. Not this soon. Richie can’t be the one left over again. He wants to throw up but he actually hasn’t eaten anything, and okay, so dry-heaving is totally a thing now.

Eddie’s hands are on his shoulders. That’s… that’s good. Yes. That means Eddie is still here. He’s real. He’s not a ghost. Richie is not losing his mind.

“Hey,” Eddie says, and his voice is so gentle. “Richie, you need to breathe, okay? I’m breathing too, okay, can you hear me.” He breathes, in and out, and Richie tries to follow along. He would do anything for Eddie. “Just do what I do. Breathe in.” Eddie’s thumbs are stroking his neck. “Breathe out.”

Richie tries to focus on Eddie’s face right in front of his. He’s here. He’s okay. Yes, good. Richie breathes.

“Hey, Rich, you with me again?”

Richie nods. “Yeah, yeah. I was just…” He trails off, unsure how to explain the utter terror of losing Eddie. Again. And again.

Eddie smirks. “That’s an impressive panic attack for someone who isn’t stuck in Derry because his magical resurrection is apparently geo-locked to the shittiest town on the Eastern Seaboard.”

Richie snorts despite the way his whole body feels like he’s run a marathon. “You’re such a jerk, you know that?” He takes the hand Eddie is offering to get up, and he pulls Eddie close. He needs to feel Eddie, the physical manifestation of his muscles, his bones, his stupid adorable face. Richie wraps himself around Eddie like his life depends on it, and in some ways, maybe it does. He whispers in Eddie’s ear. “You realize that if you’re stuck here, I’m stuck here, right? Because I’m not leaving until you do.”

Eddie pats his back. “Stop being so emotional, it’s creepy.” He sounds choked up. Richie chooses not to mention that.

+

It takes Audra a moment. And some liberal application of high percentage alcohol. She thinks it’s bourbon but what does she know? She’s a wine cooler girl. Bill looks like he’s aged ten years while he was away and she’s pretty sure there’s blood on some of his clothes. So that, and the stutter, help with the whole story about facing off against an old bully and a serial killer, even though half her mind goes, “this won’t end well if Bill is telling it”. And she laughs because it’s fucking funny. But she believes him.

They settle into an uneasy truce for a few days and then he stands in the door of their bedroom and says, “there’s more,” like that’s not going to make Audra want to throw things at him.

Audra’s mother was super into supernatural bullshit, so Audra has a healthy sense of when a person is off in some fantasy of theirs that replaces whatever they can’t get emotionally in real life, but this is not that. Bill looks terrified. He looks like he really was dealing with a killer alien from space who wore a clown suit just because that’s even more scary.

“It f-feeds on fear,” he says, “and that’s why it’s targeting ch-children. But we took care of it, we beat it.”

“My friend d-d-died,” he says.

“I have to go b-back, because he’s in trouble,” he says.

This is where Audra starts drinking from the bottle. “Your dead friend is in trouble?” Bill just nods. Audra nods back. “Sure, your dead friend. Is in trouble. So you have to go to Maine again. That girl gonna be there, Beverly?”

Bill nods. Audra nods back. “Alright,” she says, wondering what’s happening to her marriage right now. Because she does believe him. She believes that something happened back in Maine and that it is tearing Bill up inside. Unfinished business. She knows a thing or two about that.

“I want you to come with me,” he says.

Audra nods. Her neck is getting tired from all the goddamn nodding. “Okay,” she says, “you want me to come to the place with the scary murder clown to meet your dead friend and the girl you were in love with for thirty years.”

Bill nods.

Audra packs their bags.

+

Eddie drives them back to the library because Richie is still a mess and Eddie needs something else to concentrate on, other than the fact that he is stuck in this nightmare town. He’s angry with the turtle, he’s angry with himself, even a little bit angry with Stan, who clearly knew that something like this was going to happen.

There are people on the street just doing their thing, just living their lives, like this isn’t Derry, like this isn’t the place where kids get murdered and people disappear at an alarming rate. But that’s people for you, isn’t it? If you can somehow ignore the horror of life to keep going, you will.

Isn’t that how he ended up marrying Myra, despite every inch of his body rebelling against the thought? He’d thrown up at the wedding, not that it was much of a wedding. City hall, the witness a co-worker of Myra’s who owed her some kind of favor, nothing beyond what was absolutely necessary to make it work. She’d pushed, but then that has always been Myra’s MO. Eddie doesn’t remember actually falling in love with her. It’s like she picked him out of a lineup and dragged him along all the way to now, and he let her, because it was easy.

Nothing in his life now is easy. Richie is a high-maintenance jerk, Derry is a rotten cesspool, he’s probably been fired in absentia and oh, he’s a magical creature now.

Eddie hits the gas a little harder, edging way above the speed limit and basking in the way people turn their heads to look at the commotion. He wants them to notice, he wants to crash through their complacency and shatter their illusions.

The light in front of him turns red and Eddie hits the brakes hard. Richie gives a startled yelp. Eddie looks over to apologize on instinct, but outside Richie’s window he sees something that freezes him in his tracks.

At first, it’s just a person, wrapped in a burgundy hoodie, slouching against the wall next to the café, and he gets this Bowers’ gang vibe. He’s itching for a fight and almost starts to leave the car, but then they turn around. He corrects his assessment downward, they look much younger, coltish and uneasy, a teen maybe a little older than the Losers were, back then.

They wear a shirt, black, with a single rainbow fist emblazoned on it. Under the fist, in sparkly silver letters, it reads:

Adrian was here.

The kid zips up the hoodie and slouches further, walking head-bent in an effort to be as unnoticeable as possible. But Eddie has seen them. Eddie understands.

He’s not the only one who can’t leave, and there are always Losers in Derry. There are always those who will be targets, those who make themselves targets, because they’re loud, and honest, and true.

Eddie stares after the kid and misses the light turning green. Richie says, “Eyes on the road, Eds.” 

Eddie thinks, yes, he finally has his eyes on the road.

+

Mike has no trouble getting back to Derry. He can feel the town pulling him back, like the string he thought he’d cut turned out to be a rubber band. He curses the moment he hits town limits and everything feels so goddamn familiar.

He stops his car and gets out, starts pacing, trying to get a grip on this ugly emotion bursting through his skin. It’s anger married to resentment and steeped in fear. He hates this town and he loves this town, there is no place for forgetting and that’s unfair, too, because some things deserve to lose their clarity over time. Like the way the clown’s heart felt in his hand.

He thinks about Eddie, about leaving him behind and he yells at the unforgiving sky, the silent, judgemental trees. “Why us, huh? Why did it have to be us? Did we not deserve a normal life? Didn’t we deserve to be happy? What’s wrong with us that you could do this so easily?”

The silence doesn’t hold any answers.

He gets back in his car and for a good ten minutes he wonders if he can move forward, put himself at Derry’s mercy again, or if this little taste of freedom was too much. He’s been the keeper of the lighthouse for too long, he can’t do it any more. Whatever comes next, Derry has lost him forever.

Mike takes several deep breaths, steels himself, and starts the engine. His friends need him and Mike will do anything in his power to help. Anything at all.

+

Eddie pulls up in front of the Derry Townhouse. Richie blinks at the sign and makes a vague gesture at the old building. “Uh, Eds, why are we here?” All their stuff is in the trunk, but that doesn’t mean Richie has any desire to stay even so much as an hour in the place that reminds him so much of the war they have just come home from. Twenty-seven years and a shitty hotel, that’s what Pennywise amounts to in his heart.

Eddie sighs and looks at the hotel as if it’s haunted by his ghost. Shit, it probably was, too, back when Eddie was still dead. Richie shivers.

“I don’t know,” Eddie says, “I had the strangest feeling that we needed to be here. We should check it out, right? It couldn’t hurt.”

Richie laughs. He’s on edge, but not enough to make a joke about Eddie dying again. “Right, yes, of course. What could possibly go wrong?”

Eddie drums on the steering wheel. “Okay. Getting out now. Any minute.”

They remain in the car. This is what being a video game character must feel like when your player is off to take a dump and get some snacks after. Away from keyboard. “It’s not like we have a whole lot of other places to go, and I suppose Mike would appreciate if we didn’t have sex all over his apartment.”

Eddie drops his head on the steering wheel and sighs. “You’re impossible.” It sounds like: I love you.

“Impossibly awesome, maybe.”

Eddie reaches out with his right hand and Richie takes it, like a reflex at this point. Eddie’s hand is his and anything else Eddie is willing to give him. Richie squeezes Eddie’s hand gently, a reminder that they’re both here, both perfectly alive and touchable. Whatever is happening, Eddie isn’t dead, he’s not a ghost or a figment of Richie’s overeager imagination. He’s solid and perfect and real.

“Okay,” Eddie says and leans back. “We’re going in.”

It takes them another two minutes to disentangle from the safety of the car, but they make it to the front door, when it opens and a blonde woman peeks out at them with a deep frown etched into her face. She looks them both up and down without opening the door any further. She’s vaguely familiar, like a dream you forget upon waking.

“Who are you?” She asks, tone somewhere between defensive and dismissive.

Richie raises his eyebrows indignantly, but he can’t even get in a word edgewise before Eddie explodes. “And who the fuck are you, then?” There’s a very old, very horny part of Richie that really gets excited about Eddie just pushing at the door like a thirteen year old hypochondriac, all arms and righteous indignation. It’s not intimidating at all, and Richie can see that the woman is more annoyed than scared as she steps back to let Eddie inside.

“Can’t believe it, it’s not like we’re criminals or something. Do we look like criminals to you? No, we do not. He,” and he points at Richie, “looks like a librarian had sex with a hawaiian shirt.”

Richie snorts. “It’s true.” He smiles at the woman and holds out his hand as Eddie stalks inside. “Richie Tozier. Nice to meet you.”

The woman’s eyes go wide. “You’re Richie.” She doesn’t take his hand, but there is a small, sharp smile curling at the edge of her mouth.

“Oh,” he says, suddenly aware that she does look familiar. He’s certain he’s seen her before. “I take it you’re not a fan?”

Laughing, she waves him inside. “I can honestly say I’d never heard of you a week ago, but a lot of things can change in a week.”

Richie, at this point, has no idea what day it is, but it’s entirely possible a week ago he was standing on a stage in front of a massive audience, unable to say his own name. Time moves differently when you’re having fun, or when you’re scared out of your goddamn mind. “Yeah,” he says, “I guess it can.”

A shriek emerges from the lobby and Richie jumps. That’s Eddie’s voice. Richie’s fear responses are never going to be okay again, because it immediately puts him in monster killing mode. He races after Eddie and slams into what can only be described as a people mountain. Eddie is being crushed by four very familiar faces just piling the fuck on. Someone grabs his arm, maybe it’s Bev, and just pulls him into this big mass of limbs and tears and whispers of “fuck, we missed you” and “good to see you, you look like shit”.

Somehow the group hug manages to clear Richie’s mind and he gasps. “What the fuck is Audra Philipps doing in Derry?”

“You know,” she says from behind him, “I’m not sure I know the answer to that but I think it’s a form of relationship therapy.”

It’s Bill who pipes up from the other side of the Eddie-pile. “Uh, that’s my wife.” He says it with no small amount of pride and Richie can’t help himself, he dog whistles.

“Nice one, Big Bill.”

Eddie smacks Richie’s arm. “Hey, watch it.”

Richie grins. “What, the only woman I can joke about is your mother?” Eddie extracts himself from the hug so he can better round on Richie. The others all drift a comfortable foot or so away, close enough for more emergency hugging if it becomes necessary. Ben keeps his arm around Bev, and Bill crosses the room to stand next to Audra and preen. It’s that look of pride and devotion that softens Audra and makes her smile properly.

But Richie can’t actually concentrate on any of the others, because Eddie is in his face, like they’re the only two people in the world. “You’re so obnoxious, Richie, can’t you be serious for like five minutes?” Eddie is so close, Richie can feel Eddie’s breath on his face. “God, you’re so…” Eddie trails off, staring at Richie’s mouth.

Richie puts his hands on Eddie’s face and leans in to kiss him. He gets to do this now, in front of the only people who matter, he gets to make Eddie make this soft, careless noise that sends jolts of pleasure through Richie’s body. They kiss like they’re alone, deep and desperate and noisy.

Mike coughs into his hand. “Not to interrupt this lovely moment, but I think we all need to talk.”

+

There’s magic in Derry. This is a fact.

Mike tries to explain what he’s learned in his years of lonely vigil. There is magic in Derry. It, Pennywise, came here because of it, attracted to the power of something much bigger than itself. It fed off the magic as much as it was feeding off children’s fear and their blood and bones. Mike knows this because there was magic in Derry even when the monster was asleep.

“Back in 1989 we had no idea, but it was a powerful year all over the world. It was a year of change, a year of upheaval, and I believe that’s part of the reason we managed to beat It. Humanity was at a moment of transition and there was power humming in the very air. We managed to absorb and use some of that power and turned it back on the monster.”

Everyone nods like they understand, but they don’t. Mike doesn’t understand it either. Eddie looks troubled, but whatever he’s contemplating, he’s not ready to share it with the class just yet. Richie, however, has no such hesitancy.

“Okay, so how can we use that to help Eddie? The moment he hits the town limits, he literally disappears.”

Mike nods. “I think it’s because of what you said earlier, he’s taken over the role of guardian here in Derry. The magic here is strong, but it’s not universal. If he leaves, it can’t follow him around. So whatever it is, it makes sure he can’t go.”

Bev mutters “fucking turtle” under her breath.

Bill nods. “It was there when we were k-kids.”

“It’s not the turtle,” Audra says, and raises her hand to her lips as if they have betrayed her. Her eyes are wide with shock. Bill takes her hand and squeezes and that seems to ground her a little. She shakes her head. “I, sorry, I know I shouldn’t even be here, I’m not a part of this-”

Bev looks up sharply. “But you are. I saw you.”

Bev, Audra, Bill and Richie, exactly at the same time, say: “In the deadlights.” And then everything is silence.

It’s Mike who breaks through it, because he’s seen something, too, and it wasn’t from staring into the maw of death itself. “The native tribe who helped me-”

“Who you stole from,” Richie snipes.

Mike glares at him. “The tribe I stole from, they use certain herbs to smoke in their purification ceremonies-”

“Jesus, Mike, they let you join in their sacred rituals? And then you took their sacred object? That’s low, buddy.” Richie starts giggling and Bill joins in.

Mike bristles. Yes, he’s well fucking aware that he has brought all the bad luck down on himself, but here’s the thing. “Hey, motherfuckers, maybe shut up about that for a second and realize that I was alone here and trying to stop that fucking clown from killing any more kids. I didn’t think the tribe was going to believe me, and why would they?”

Audra, thank god for Audra, opens her mouth and the boys go silent. “I get it. I barely believe it myself and I feel like somehow I should know, like this is one of those movies where my part got cut for time, you know?”

Mike nods. “Anyway, I couldn’t risk it. I was already going to lie to the best friends I ever had and probably get them all killed, what’s a little cultural appropriation on top of that.”

Eddie nods. “You did what you had to.” Mike smiles at him. Eddie understands about sacrifice, even if it’s ugly and messy.

“Anyway, the herbs that I gave Bill,” he looks over and Bill is definitely still a little sore about being roofied, “they can be burned, too. Basically, it’s like one of those sweat lodge rituals. We could do it, too, maybe get some answers from the turtle.”

Bev grins. “You know people literally die in those when they’re done by new age fucks who don’t know any better.”

Ben, who has been silent the entire time, looks directly at Mike, then at Bill and Richie. “We should do it at the clubhouse.”

They all fall silent, and Mike has this weird feeling of deja-vu, like this isn’t the first time they’ve tried psychotropic drugs in their little dirt hovel. He remembers everything about their summer, and everything that came after, and this has never happened, but it feels like it did.

+

Every single one of us has their own story. We’re all protagonists in our own tales. It’s just that sometimes we have to figure out the genre, and then, every so often, it turns from a coming-of-age romance to a horror sci-fi mashup.

You know, that’s just how life goes sometimes.

+

The turtle isn’t speaking to Eddie right now and that’s some bullshit right there. So he goes along with the absolutely insane plan of getting them all high as kites with an open flame in what is essentially going to be a sauna. They’re probably all going to die.

The clubhouse is exactly how they left it. Audra, the only one who’s never seen it, is surprisingly no-nonsense about the whole thing where they are attempting unsafe, potentially magical rituals they are making up by the seat of their pants, and also the dirt. She and Bev, somewhat unsurprisingly, get along like a house on fire. Bill seems to take this with all the grace of a newborn foal. He keeps staring from one to the other as they talk about their overlapping industries.

By the time Mike has set up the campfire, they’re all loitering around the clubhouse, picking up old toys and older memories.

Richie looks a little lost, sadder than he has ever since Eddie came back from the dead. Eddie walks over to him and bumps Richie’s shoulder with his own. “Hey,” Eddie says, not pushing but making sure Richie knows he’s there.

“Eddie,” Richie says, still looking at the old comic book in his hands. “Eddie, you know I won’t leave you, right? If we have to live in Derry until we’re a hundred years old, I don’t care, I’m going to do it.”

Eddie sighs, hands firmly in his pockets. He desperately wants to reach out to Richie, but that’s just going to make this harder. “What about your career? You can’t really make a living here as a comedian.”

Richie shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll be a drama teacher. Or a super hot librarian.”

“Taking over Mike’s job, that sounds more like what I’m doing.” And he is, as much as Stan was supposed to be the guardian, Mike was the one staying in Derry. Now it’s Eddie’s turn to do both.

Richie turns to him and puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, right at the base of his neck. It makes Eddie shiver, the good way. “I’ll be a server at McDonald’s if that’s what it takes, Eddie. I’m not leaving you.”

Eddie offers Richie a smile. “You’d be terrible in the food service industry. You’d insult all the customers for all their bad choices.”

Mike’s call pulls them to the center of the clubhouse and he makes them all sit down in a circle. They’re seven again and somehow Eddie has a feeling that’s going to make a difference, the magic is as much about ritual as it is about belief. Seven is more powerful than five or six, and maybe that means they’re going to be lucky once more. Just one more time, for all the sacrifices they had to make.

The turtle owes them one good day.

The acrid smoke burns Eddie’s eyes and he has enough time to think “this is ridiculous” before the clubhouse falls away and he’s standing in a featureless white glow. There is nothing here, and it scares the shit out of Eddie because if he imagines hell, this is what it looks like: a great expanse of nothing at all.

“Hey, turtle, I know you’re here somewhere. How about you talk to me? You know, courtesy between old friends and all. After you completely refrained from telling me about my new job and its, you know,” and he makes sarcastic air quotes, “‘limitations’.”

The glow becomes infinitely brighter and seems to collect at one central point. It looks like it’s only a few feet away but without any sense of scale, it could be galaxies. The turtle literally sucks the light out of Eddie’s surroundings, everything else turning into the pitch black of empty space. The turtle alone shines and it is magnificent.

It speaks with the voice of the universe.

EDDIE.

“Yes, I’m here. And I want some answers.”

YOU DON’T NEED MY HELP.

Eddie, frustrated beyond belief, is yelling at a god. “Oh, that’s so easy for you to say, it’s not like you have ever actually helped anyone!”

The turtle laughs and Eddie’s world shakes to pieces. I HAVE TRADED MY LIFE ONCE FOR THE TOWER, IT WAS MY DUTY AS A GUARDIAN OF THE BEAM. THAT DUTY IS OVER. YOU MUST TAKE MY PLACE.

“Fuck the tower! Fuck you and your stupid beam! I just want to live my life, is that so fucking much to ask?” He’s close to tears but he doesn’t care. When can you cry with frustration if not in front of an unforgiving god?

EDDIE, the turtle says, and the sound rumbles through Eddie in gentle waves. It hurts, but it is as soft as the turtle knows how to be. One can not face a god and imagine not to be burned. THE MAGIC IS ALREADY AT YOUR DISPOSAL. THE CIRCLE CAN GIVE LIFE, YOU SIMPLY HAVE TO DIRECT IT. CONVINCE THE BEAM THAT YOU WILL RETURN WHEN YOU ARE NEEDED, AND IT WILL LET YOU GO.

The turtle disappears and the darkness is so thick that Eddie imagines he has gone blind. It’s Richie’s hands on his face, Richie’s breath on his lips, that bring Eddie back to himself. They’re kissing softly, Eddie’s hands curling at Richie’s sides. He’s holding on for dear life, like Richie is his lifeboat in an ocean of meaningless nothing.

They’re outside the clubhouse, and next to him Bev, Bill and Audra are coughing violently. He has a feeling that they have also had their own visions. Maybe Richie, too. Richie, who is kissing him like he’s going to disappear.

Eddie puts his hands on either side of Richie’s jaw and pushes him up enough so they can talk. “I think I know what to do,” Eddie says.

Richie’s eyes are glassy when he says: “I saw you die. I saw all of you die, I saw It rip out your arm like it was a butterfly wing. I saw it hurt you over and over and over.”

Eddie’s blood runs cold and he curses that turtle. Isn’t it enough that Richie has to deal with his own trauma, now he gets the other Richies’ trauma, too? All the versions of him who never got to say what they felt, who never knew what it was like to be fully themselves. Eddie is furious and he’s determined.

He’s sitting up, fighting against the nausea that’s settled in his stomach, and calling for the others. “Hey, guys, I know what we need to do.” It’s not going to be easy, because he has a feeling that this part has never happened before. Eddie Kaspbrak always dies. It’s the first time Eddie is going to take it back. He’s going to get his life back.

+

There's no fate but what we make for ourselves. 


	9. The End Is the Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes quite a bit of emotional trauma and gore. A lot of this chapter pulls from the book and the mini-series, the entire idea of multiple connected universes is an extension of Dark Tower lore.

This is how his world ends, always.

Richie is repressed. Richie doesn’t know himself. Richie is afraid.

He’s so goddamn afraid.

So he doesn’t speak when he should, he doesn’t allow himself to be truthful, he hesitates when he should act. It’s Eddie who pays the price, every time. But Richie is not any better off, he’s not ever okay. Sometimes he forgets, and that’s not any more kind than the times he doesn’t. He lives with it forever, always, each and every single one of him.

This is how his world ends.

Eddie’s last breath. The knowledge that things unsaid will forever remain so.

But.

Not all endings are endings.

Sometimes endings are just a way for the universe to start something new, a new chapter, a different story with the same moving parts. Sometimes you have to go through the dark to see the light.

And sometimes you have to fight for it.

+

They return to the Townhouse after their vision quest. Bill, Beverly, Audra and Richie all have their heads down and their defenses up. They don’t talk about what they saw. Not that it matters when Eddie sort of got the answer they need. As mystical advice goes, it could have been worse, but “the power was in you all along” is always a bit of a letdown.

It doesn’t tell them exactly how to use that power or anything useful in terms of what else they can potentially do with it. Eddie wonders if this technically makes them all witches or something, if that’s a thing that just exists in their world now. What else has this world in store and what exactly are the responsibilities of a guardian anyway? Is he a knock-off Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Richie is not talking even when Eddie gives him easy setups and that scares Eddie more than any of the things the turtle or Pennywise can do to him at this point. Eddie takes Richie’s hand because he can and because it grounds him in the here and now. Richie smiles, but it’s one of those sad smiles people give to their dying pets before they close their eyes forever. An “I love you” smile that also says “the reality of death has opened in me a gaping chasm of sorrow”.

They arrange themselves artfully around the hotel lobby, closer to the bar the more visions one’s had, and both Bev and Richie are behind it, rummaging around for glasses and ice. This is the kind of thing that’s easier when you’re smashed, and Eddie can’t really object to that. He could use a stiff drink or five.

“It’s a ritual,” he says as Richie presses a glass into his hands, their fingers brushing. Eddie smiles up at Richie and takes a sip. He coughs as the liquid touches the back of his throat, because that’s fucking paint thinner.

“Like Chüd?” Mike asks. He sounds tired. But then, they probably all sound tired. It’s been easily the longest week of all their lives.

Eddie tries to put into words what the turtle has made him feel. “Not like Chüd, Chüd wasn’t ever going to work. It wasn’t ours.” Mike sighs and drains his own glass. He motions for Richie to top him off. Eddie sips at his drink again, more careful this time. It burns like a California wildfire. “No, we had power because of the circle we made that summer. When we sliced our palms open, and by the way, we were so stupidly lucky that shit didn’t get infected, we made a promise and that promise gave us our power, even twenty seven years later.”

Audra raises her hand. She looks pointedly at all of them when Eddie nods. “I wasn’t there, so how is this going to work? Please don’t say you’re going to cut my hand open.”

Eddie gives her a pained smile. “I’m going to cut your hand open.”

Audra nods. “I really shouldn’t have asked.” Bill pulls her to his side and it’s obvious there’s a lot of tension between them, but she rests her head on his shoulder and that’s enough. There’s love there. Love is all they need.

A loud crash makes Eddie flinch. Beverly, who’s been handing out drinks like they’re soda, holds up the broken bottle with a severe grin on her face. “Don’t worry,” she says, “it only hurts after.”

Eddie sighs. “I have bandages and disinfectant in the car and we’re not cutting through to the bone like Bill did. Really, we were so lucky we could all still use our hands that year. Or ever.”

Bill snorts. “Hey!”

Eddie glares at Bev. “Put that down before you hurt yourself or someone else. None of you know the least thing about how to care for a wound properly.”

“I do,” Richie pipes up and when everyone looks at him, he blushes. “I… I listen to Eddie. A lot. I think it’s been established at this point that he could probably read the phone book and I would memorize every single word.”

Eddie stares at Richie and something weird is happening in his stomach. It feels like nausea but somehow lighter, airy and soft. “What, uh-”

Richie closes his eyes and rubs his forehead. “Look, I mean-”

Mike interrupts the awkwardness. “Not that this isn’t hilarious, and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say, it’s okay, we know you’re into each other, we all have eyes, please never worry about the fact that we all love you. But can we please get back to the blood ritual we’re about to do?”

Eddie nods, trying to pretend he’s not blushing like a middle-schooler. “I’m just gonna get the supplies.”

They stand in a circle: Audra between Bev and Bill, as weird as that seems, then Mike. There’s a space for Eddie there to stand with Richie, who closes the circle with Ben. Eddie goes around with a piece of thoroughly disinfected glass and cuts shallowly into skin, far more careful than Bill because he knows what happens when the tendons in the hand are damaged. He’s seen the insurance claims.

He looks each of them in the eyes, because this isn’t about a murderous clown, this isn’t the fate of the world, this is all for him. This is personal, intimate magic to save one single person. This is so he can have a second chance at life and there is no way he can ever thank any of them for doing this.

“Alright,” he says as he cuts Mike’s skin. Blood’s welling out of the wound and Eddie has to swallow hard, because he can feel how much that’s going to hurt later. Even small cuts can be nasty and he hopes none of them are going to need stitches. “I don’t really know how this works or if it’s going to do anything special.” Bill doesn’t flinch, but Audra does. She smiles at him anyway, and Eddie can see why Bill fell in love with her. “Maybe we just stand here like a bunch of idiots and when it’s done I can leave.”

Bev and Ben are stoic as Eddie cuts them, but Richie is a big baby about it. “Ouch, oh my god, Eddie, I need that hand to jerk off.”

Eddie just gives him the driest fucking raised eyebrow.

And then Richie takes his hand, carefully, because someone has to do Eddie’s cut and Eddie shivers at the contact. They stare at each other for too long, and Richie is… god, Richie is so stupid and so brave, and he kisses Eddie’s palm, right there in front of everyone, and then draws the piece of glass across the meatiest part of Eddie’s hand.

Eddie takes his place and they all take each other’s hands at the same time. For a good few seconds nothing happens, long enough that Eddie’s about to laugh and say something derogatory about magic, and then his world goes dark.

+

Audra finds herself on top of a hill. The houses around her are small, flat and worn-out, and the road down toward the intersection is steep and narrow. Everything seems old, but not medieval-old, just cheap-old, chipped and frayed and ugly.

She feels like she’s walking through water, not cold or warm, just friction trying to keep her in place. Her thoughts feel sluggish, too. She remembers pain, she remembers Bill, and those two things shouldn’t go together, but they do.

A shining flash of light, like ball lightning, passes her on the way down. It’s fast and so very bright. It warms her, somehow, and she can feel tears on her cheeks. There’s on echo of a word, and the word is: silver.

Audra smiles. Her breath fogs the air in front of her face, but it’s not cold enough for that. She wraps her arms around herself anyway and the feeling of safety hits her immediately. Bill does this, he wraps himself around her, and it always makes her feel cared for. She loves him. She sometimes thinks she loves him more than he loves her. Sometimes, when he looks at her, it’s like he’s looking right through her.

Walking down the hill, the light passes her again.

Silver, it seems to say, with such joy it takes Audra’s breath away.

The figure of a woman stands at the foot of the hill, waiting for her. Audra walks faster. She knows deep in her bones that the woman is familiar, that she has the answers to Audra’s questions. As she gets closer, the figure turns around and this must be a dream because Audra knows two things: that woman is her, and she looks nothing like her.

The woman has long, dark hair, and a face with delicate features. She’s beautiful like Beverly, and if you took Beverly Marsh, translated her description twice, and did it with different ideas of what’s beautiful, you’d get both Audra and this other woman. They’re both imitations of an ideal in different directions.

That thought pierces Audra’s heart and her steps falter. Is that what she is, on the cosmic scale? A facsimile? She’s always felt like she was second best, but to have it confirmed on this level, that hurts. And it makes her angry. She’s furious, with Bill, with herself, with the universe.

Silver!

And this time, the light does not soften her fury, but stokes it, makes her want to rip the world to pieces. She breathes heavily and stands braced for an impact. The muscles in her shoulders and back tighten and her fists are curled into small wrecking balls. She screams. She screams out everything that curls like acid in her stomach, all the emotions that festered there, for years.

“I hate that my mother made me an actress before I could be a person,” she yells and almost sobs on the last word. “I hate this fucking industry that only sees me for a pretty face and a pair of tits.” She takes deep, gulping breaths. “I hate that Bill doesn’t love me.”

She breaks on that last one, breaks and feels all the fury ebb out of her, all the power seeping through her and into the ground. She stumbles into the street and falls to her knees, head bent and heart empty.

The light comes at her with impossible speed. It’s blinding up close, and so, so hot, and then it crashes into her and she explodes into a million tiny points of light. No, not her. The light bursts around her and seeps into her, and she raises her gaze toward the sky. It’s like she’s floating in a newborn galaxy and she reaches up, reaches into the sky, to touch the stars.

Love floods her so completely she can’t comprehend it. A hand touches her shoulder, rests there with gentle fire.

“He brought me back to life,” the woman says, and her voice is the melody of the stars. Audra weeps and does not look at her. “He still thinks that if it hadn’t worked, we would have both died. But he loves me so much, and he believed just enough, that somehow on our way down this hill, I came back to life.”

Audra can feel the tiniest pinprick of hope in her chest. She looks at the woman, who is her and not her, who is English and poised and beautiful, who has Bill where Audra only has doubt.

The woman smiles. “He loves you,” she says, “he loves you so much. He’s very bad at showing you that and he will probably fail a lot. It’s your choice if you want to let him try.” The woman offers her hand and Audra takes it.

A light starts glowing where their hands touch and Audra can feel it all, the way Bill loves her, every Bill that ever was. The doubt, the guilt, the yearning, and the love. All of it is so bright, so strong, and this is it. This is what she needs.

She pulls the light into herself, let’s it flow through her, and thinks that whatever Eddie wants to do, she will lend him this power.

+

Mike is outside, not the Barrens but somewhere closer to the Kitchener Ironworks. The area lies fallow, has been unused and mostly ignored for decades. It’s a good thing, because there are still children’s bones they never found and whatever would be built here, would be built on a massive graveyard.

Mike shudders as he makes his way across the field of flowers. It doesn’t look like the site of a massacre, but then the earth heals much faster than anyone’s memory. Only our very biggest battles leave scars in the literal ground, and only for a little while. The earth heals faster, and it heals more thoroughly, than any human heart.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only knows that he’s looking for something. There are birds high up in the sky and their relentless circles set off a cascade of fear in his brain. He feels like a mouse about to be eaten by a hawk.

The woman appears out of nowhere. He should have seen her coming, but he didn’t, and now she’s standing a mere hundred feet away, her hair in a headscarf the way they wore it in the 50s and 60s, beautiful sundress playing around a narrow figure. When she turns around he realizes that he’s crying, because he can only see a blurry smudge of color and contrast. But he knows, he knows who she is.

He’s shaking. His mouth won’t cooperate and his throat is swelling up with tears he was sure he’d been done shedding long ago. He can’t breathe and he can’t stay still. He launches himself across the field and throws himself at this woman, who looks nothing like his mother but somehow…

Somehow she is.

“Ma,” he croaks out, and doesn’t have any other words for a very long time. He’s crying, he’s sobbing and she just holds him, whispers sweetly into his ear, rubs his head like she used to.

“It’s okay,” she says, “my baby. It’s okay. I’m here for you. I will always be here for you.”

Later, when he’s exhausted and worn from the tears like a canyon that’s been cut through to the bone, they sit in the grass, basking in the summer sun. There’s a picnic basket and a blanket and it’s all a little too much like a dream. He knows it’s not real, and when he looks up at the sky, at the birds, he hopes it’s not.

“You were always so curious,” she says, and he knows she’s talking about someone who wasn’t really him. Not this version of him, not the Mike Hanlon whose parents died in a fire when he was so small he can barely remember their faces. “Always out and about. Your daddy loved it, he loved giving you assignments to do.”

Mike smiles, and it hurts, but it’s the best he’s ever felt. He has been so alone for so long. “Mom,” he says, and knows this is the worst thing in the world he can ask, because then whatever this is, is going to end. “I need to know why I’m here.”

She laughs. “Always so diligent, my boy. You never met a task you wouldn’t take on. I’ve never seen you give up, not once. Even when you thought it was impossible.”

He loves her so completely, it fills him with such warmth. How easy it would be to stay here, but she’s right. Mike Hanlon does not walk away from a task. He does what is needed. He does not back down, ever.

“You are so strong,” she says, as she stands up and brushes imaginary dirt from her dress. She’s beautiful, and he can see his actual mother’s face in hers. They’re the same person, just a little sideways, like a story told by two different people, at two different times.

Mike hugs his mother, his face buried in her neck. She rubs his back like a colicky child and whispers love directly into his soul. He has to go, he knows that. So he untangles himself from her and smiles, one more time, at the woman who raised him, who made one Mike Hanlon into the man he is. Maybe she was the first, maybe she was the one who created the template - her love made it possible for even the saddest version of him to be strong, and sure, and true.

“I love you, Ma,” he says, and somehow there are still tears, even though he thought he had finally cried them all.

She smiles as he turns to face the birds swooping down on them. He doesn’t have a weapon, all he has is his belief, and he’s not afraid. He stands his ground as the birds grow closer and so very big. These are no ordinary birds, they’re like the giant eagles in Lord of the Rings, but much uglier, all harsh angles and rot. Mike narrows his eyes and widens his stance. If need be, he’s going to punch them in the face.

As the first bird reaches him, Mike fights the urge to close his eyes. Just before it touches him, the monster explodes into a million motes of glittering light and Mike feels its power flow through him.

+

The bar feels familiar and safe the moment Ben walks into it. He’s never been here, but it feels like coming home, the lights and smells and sounds, everything exactly the way he remembers. There’s a man at the bar who stares at him with something like shock on his face. He’s in the middle of drying a glass, but the moment he lays eyes on Ben, he freezes.

“Mr. Hanscom?”

Ben grins at him and walks over. The stools are comfortably worn and creak when he sits down. “Can I have a beer?”

The man gives him a smile, a nod, and slides an ice cold bottle across the bar. “I have to say, Mr. Hanscom, after the last time you were here, I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”

Ben takes a drink and looks out at the bar. “We’ve never actually met,” he says. “The Ben Hanscom you knew, hell, I have no idea what happened to him. Could be dead.”

The bartender sighs. “He could be, at that. I really thought he was going to drink himself to death and then when he left, I was sure I’d hear about a terrible accident that night.”

Ben’s lips twitch in a sarcastic smile. “But you didn’t.”

“No,” the man says, shaking his head. “I did not.”

“The thing is,” Ben says, very softly, “if he was anything like me, your Mr. Hanscom went off to have the very worst and the very best week of his life. Weirdly at the same time.”

The bartender takes this in and nods. Their conversation slows to a halt as they listen to the music that plays in the background. It’s more modern than the decor suggests, very late 2010s. Ben orders another beer and starts walking around the open space of the bar. The booths at the back wall are worn-out red pleather and cheap wooden veneer that’s peeling off in places. There are scuff marks, cuts and burns on the table tops, but that only adds to the warm, homey aura of the place.

There are pictures all over the walls and Ben steps closer to take a look. Some of them are celebrities giving the smiling owner a little publicity boost. Some of them are of Ben with the bartender. Ben, who’s not always the same person, smiling, but never exactly happy. He looks like a lost boy, like someone Peter Pan never quite let go from Neverland.

Ben points at one of the pictures, the one where the bartender looks the most like the guy behind the counter right now. The closest to the original version, perhaps. Dimension-hopping magic sure can be weird sometimes.

“Is that your Mr. Hanscom?”

The bartender walks over, a bright smile on his face. “He hated having his picture taken. I didn’t know why until he told me that he used to be a bit bigger.” He makes a round gesture with his hands. Ben laughs. “He is very rich,” the bartender says. “Owned a big property a few miles out and could own the entire state if he wanted, I think. It always made me wonder why he came here. He always did, though, even when he wasn’t even in the country. Made some late night flight just to sit here and drink alone.”

Ben grinned. “He wasn’t alone, I think that’s the point.”

“Some people thought he was gay, a man like him, living alone, but I never did.” The bartender looks at Ben’s furrowed brow. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that! These days, people just want to find a way to be happy, yeah?”

Laughing, Ben puts a hand on the bartender’s shoulder. “I think that’s all we ever tried to be. But I can honestly say that of the people I grew up with, I might well be the token straight guy. For me, there just never was anyone but this one girl.”

“That’s very romantic,” the bartender says, though he looks slightly confused.

Ben snorts. “It’s really not. I wasn’t a very happy person, not until I found her again. That’s not exactly a healthy way to approach your life.”

The bartender sighs. “It is still romantic. Love isn’t always easy or good, it’s just love.” When they fall silent again, it feels like an ending, and Ben knows there’s something he needs to find before this is over.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says, more to himself than to anyone.

The bartender frowns. “Are you looking for something?”

Ben shrugs. “Maybe. It doesn’t feel like I am.”

“Hm,” the man says, and heads behind the bar. He rummages in some kind of drawer until he clearly finds what he’s looking for. “Hah! I knew it was here somewhere.” He pops up with a blinding grin on his face. He flips something shiny with his thumb and Ben catches it. It’s a silver dollar.

“Sometimes, it’s not about what needs to be found, but what has been kept.”

The familiar weight in his hand says, “this kills monsters if you believe it does.” He flips it over, examines it, thinks about things that are kept for years: mementos, secrets, the love of a lifetime. The coin begins to glow.

+

When Bill opens his eyes, he’s standing on a pedestal. There’s a boy looking at him curiously. He looks, perhaps, like Georgie would if Georgie ever got to grow up a little, and sorrow grows a lump in Bill’s throat. The boy’s head is cocked as he leans closer, like he’s trying to get the right angle to decipher a couple of illegible hieroglyphs.

“Uh,” Bill says, “hey?”

The kid shakes his head. “It’s funny, you all look so different. You’re certainly the hottest of you that I’ve seen.”

Bill takes a while to translate that into words he understands. “You’ve seen me, uh, another version of me before?”

Laughing, the kid holds up a small turtle. “Ever since I’ve been helping this guy fix his bullshit, yeah, actually.” He walks around Bill once and murmurs something under his breath.

“What?” Bill asks.

“Oh,” the kid says, “nothing.” He makes a vague gesture that encompasses all of Bill’s existence. “It’s just that you would think the avatar would be a little more cool.”

SOME PEOPLE FANTASIZE ABOUT BEING THEMSELVES BUT WITH MAGIC, JAKE

The turtle speaks with a voice that pierces straight through Bill’s head and into his mind. It is too loud, too big, too much. He holds his hands over his ears, knowing that it doesn’t do any good, because the voice doesn’t transmit through sound. It simply is.

Jake pats the turtle on the head. “Shh, pipe down, you’re making his brain bleed.”

I’M USING MY INSIDE VOICE

Jake bursts out laughing and Bill flinches. He wants to ask questions, wants to dig into what Jake and the turtle know about their ritual. The turtle is an old god, something so ancient and powerful it is impossible to put into words. Not that it looks particularly powerful cradled in the nest of Jake’s arm. But what about the kid? What’s his place in all this, what’s his power?

“Why am I here?”

Jake stops and looks up at Bill. “You’ve had your moment,” he says, grinning widely. “You’ve found your purpose, went through the fire, made your peace, and so on.”

“What does that even mean?”

Of course, Bill has noticed that his stutter is gone, but he imagines it has something to do with the magical creatures grinning up at him. This isn’t exactly a normal space, it’s outside the rest of the world, on top or below of reality.

He remembers Eddie cutting into his hand, Eddie who needs him.

“Listen,” he kneels down and says to the boy, Jake, face to face. “My friend Eddie is in big trouble and he needs my help. I have to find something here that I can use to help him.”

Jake shakes his head. “I already told you, you’re done. You had your big discovery during your last battle with the spider queen. There’s really just not a whole lot more we can give you. It’s going to have to be enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

HUMANS RARELY DO

Jake puts a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “It’s alright, it’s someone else’s turn to be the hero now. All you really have to do is be there for him.”

Bill thinks about the moment he saw Eddie again, the moment he realized that Richie had done something crazy and impossible and likely very stupid, and brought him back. This isn’t Bill’s story anymore, and that’s alright. He can step aside and just be a good friend, he doesn’t have to be in charge.

The air around Bill begins to glow. “Hey, uh, what did you mean by avatar anyway?”

Jake and the turtle look at each other. The glow around him is so bright, Bill has to shield his eyes. “Oh, just that we met the guy who writes this story, once. He was kind of a jerk about the whole, you know, our entire universe hinges on his survival thing. And he’s, uh, usually got a dude in any story who is pretty much him in disguise. I always figure if you’re doing that anyway, why not make them just a little more awesome, right?”

Bill blinks the light out of his eyes. “Wait, what?” And then the light swallows him whole.

+

Beverly Marsh is punching her way through a horde of zombies. She’s drenched in blood, again, and trying to reach the other side of this bridge. The faceless, ugly, rotten things attacking her don’t seem like they were ever people. They’re meant to scare her, but they don’t have enough substance to scare a toddler. Well, maybe a toddler.

Something comes at her from the side and Bev, crouching low, reaches down, her fingers finding purchase on a smooth handle. She swings and hits the massive troll right in the chest and the creature goes flying. Bev grins and looks at her new weapon. It’s an axe, nothing special, but sharp as a sarcastic teenager’s wicked tongue.

“Come on,” she yells, grin etched sharply into her features. “Is that all you’ve got? Is it?”

New waves of decaying flesh spill out at her, into the funnel of the bridge. Bev widens her stance and weighs the axe in her hand. This is going to be fun. The monsters come in endless waves and she beats them over and over and over again. She screams and tosses them over the edge. She buries her axe in their skulls, their chests, their necks. There’s a massive amount of thick, half-congealed blood, dead before she ever touched it. It covers her head to toe but Bev is no longer afraid of it.

She is a woman, blood is her birthright. It is fought for and won.

And so she makes her way across the bridge - the kissing bridge, though much larger, and suspended above a river of fire - knowing that somehow on the other side there is something she needs to see. The flow of monsters slows to a trickle and then only one remains, a hulking thing three times her size. Its claws look razor sharp, its teeth longer than her forearm.

Bev raises her hand and beckons. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

The monster charges. With every breath it sounds like a freight train, every step is a small earth quake. Bev prepares herself. There is no winning this fight head on, just like there was no winning with Tom until she could see a way out. Her eyes focus on the other side, the base of the bridge beyond the monster.

There are things you have to fight. And sometimes, things you know you can’t fight at all. Sometimes it’s okay just to run. She braces herself and holds the axe up, keeps her center of gravity low. The monster jumps, ready to tear into her with its claws.

Bev rolls out of the way, right under the monster’s leaping feet, rolls and comes back up and runs like her life depends on it. Feels like it does, but oh, the joy of her pumping legs, her lungs breathing fire. She runs faster than she’s ever gone, every inch of her body pushing her forward. As she reaches the end of the bridge, her surroundings change to a less apocalyptic version of this place, the regular old kissing bridge.

She skids to a halt and turns around, and around, trying to find what she’s looking for. She doesn’t actually know what it looks like or why she needs it, only that Eddie needs her help and this could be… her token, yes. Like the old tokens they dug up for Chüd, except this time they’re less tangible. A memory, perhaps, or a feeling. A realization.

A woman walks up to her and Bev thinks, oh, perhaps her mother. Or maybe some version of her from all the infinite universes Eddie’s told them about. But as she comes closer, Bev can see her, and she recognizes every hair, every wrinkle, every mark on that skin. It’s her, her own self, exactly who she’s always been.

Huh.

Bev waits for herself. “Nice job,” Beverly says, and nods at the mountain of monster flesh just casually piled a few feet away. It wasn’t there a moment ago. 

Bev shrugs. “So I kind of thought I’d get some nice spirit guide or something. I have to admit, I feel a little cheated.”

Beverly grins. “Do you though? Do you really?”

Bev shakes her head. “I guess not.”

“I just want you to know one thing,” and Beverly moves into her space and softly cups her jaw. “You’re enough. You’re not perfect and you’re going to need a little work, but you’re always enough. Not that Ben’s going to be a problem, that sweet idiot worships the ground you walk on.”

Bev smiles, a soft, happy smile. “I love him.”

“I know,” says Beverly, inflection more Harrison Ford than Carrie Fisher, but a girl can’t have everything. “And I just want you to know, for you,” and she pokes Bev in the chest. “Right here, you’re good enough.”

Bev fights the urge to cry and at Beverly’s raised eyebrow she lets the tears come and throws her arms around herself. They hug until the world turns white.

+

Richie has seen this all before. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s throwing up again, because Pennywise has just ripped Eddie in half for funsies. Not his Eddie, thank god, but close enough to drive a claw right through Richie’s heart.

It plays on a loop, Eddie, dark hair caked with blood, triumphant about getting a good shot in, standing there and telling him what happened. That’s always the thing, Eddie’s always the one to hurt It and then he dies. Talk about killing the mood. And then Pennywise comes in, a monster, a massive spider, and takes Eddie between two giant pincers and tears him to pieces. There’s blood and guts everywhere, and somehow the top half, eyes clouded over, is still gurgling with a hint of life. It’s that moment in every Western where they shoot the horse with the broken leg, and Richie couldn’t even do that.

Instead, he spews vomit into a corner and tries very hard not to look as Eddie’s torso goes limp.

The lair is full of Eddies in varying states of dismemberment. All of them go from triumph to being torn apart in a matter of seconds and it’s a symphony of surprised pain, blood and guts. Richie can’t take it, but he has to get to the center. He remembers the center of the lair, where his Eddie’s body was suspended in magical light. It’s where his answer is.

He walks past the moans and groans of Eddie dying, over and over again, calling out for him. “Richie, I-”

It’s always the same. “Richie, I-”

Love you?

Maybe. Or maybe half of them really want to let him know they fucked his mom. It’s, uh, possibly the worst joke in the history of the universe. (It’s not; Eddie Dean’s dead baby joke is, objectively, both worse and more powerful.)

He looks at one Eddie, who’s actually wearing glasses on a beautiful, narrow face, his jaw broken and dislocated. His eyes are closed but he’s somehow still breathing and he’s trying to raise his hand to reach out to Richie. Richie is shaking, forcing himself to keep going, to get through this and help at least one Eddie Kaspbrak to live a long and boring life.

A body hits him and Richie goes down, clutching at the Eddie that’s been thrown at him by a dying alien spider. His arm has been torn from its socket and he bleeds heavily all over Richie. Eddie looks up at him and smiles, teeth deep red with blood. “I saved you.”

Blood’s trickling out of his mouth and all Richie can think is that Eddie would hate to be so messy. “Hah, yeah,” he says, and tries to hold the man carefully, softly, just as long as it takes. “I’m pretty sure you did, like, so much.”

Eddie coughs, drops of blood spraying everywhere. “God, I really wanted more time.”

His one remaining hand twitches and Richie entwines their fingers, kisses the crown of Eddie’s hair softly. “I’m going to make sure that you get all the time you need,” Richie says, mouth pressed into Eddie’s skin. “I’ll die before I let anything happen to-” _my Eddie_ “-you.”

Eddie’s breath rattles and he convulses heavily before he dies. It’s not an easy way to go and Richie cries big, painful tears. He sobs until Eddie stops, until his body goes entirely limp and deathly pale. Then Richie disentangles himself carefully and stands up, heart ripped to shreds. It’s not his Eddie, but it is Eddie in all the ways that matter.

Richie drags himself forward, steels his heart against the cries of death all around him. He can’t take it, it’s killing him inside, but he keeps moving. Because Eddie needs him to be stronger than this.

He stumbles, falls, gets up and carries on. There’s blood everywhere. He gets hit by arterial spray and sometimes he has to duck under an explosion of skull fragments and grey matter. He shudders, a small part of him shutting down with every last breath, every scream, every choked-off gurgle.

There are more of them, closer to the center. He has to push through bodies to get to the clearing where his Eddie’s body was before. Now, there is only a child.

Richie falls to his knees in front of the boy, unable to look him in the face. But he can see the scuffed trainers he remembers, knows that this is Richie Tozier, age thirteen, member of the Loser’s club and very repressed gay kid. He can hear him sniffling with badly hidden tears.

Richie wants to reach out, but he’s covered in blood, and worse, from head to toe.

“Who are you?” God, little Richie sounds defensive, as if anyone finding out his big, gay secret is the end of the world. Richie remembers feeling like that, remembers how afraid he was that he’d catch AIDS and Eddie would never touch him again.

“I’m the ghost of Christmas future,” Richie croaks out.

Little Richie huffs. “That’s not even funny. You’re trying way too hard.”

And Richie, he really can’t help himself. He has no filter. “That’s what your mom said last night.”

It’s no wonder Eddie died with that joke on his lips. They’re both made for each other. Little Richie sighs, arms crossed over his knees, face buried in the space they make. He sounds muffled when he speaks. “No, seriously though, who are you? Because I have an idea about that and if it’s true, maybe I really should just kill myself.”

“Haha,” Richie says, trying to play it light, but his throat is suddenly dry. Had he thought about suicide when he was this tiny? Probably. He’s a little ashamed of how much he’s thought about it over the years, and that there were days when fear and a promise he had made to friends he couldn’t remember were the only things keeping him going. “Who do you think I am?”

Little Richie glares at him. “Me, but like, super old and entirely useless.”

Richie sits down cross-legged, because this could take a while. “Fair.” His smaller, younger self looks like something the cat dragged in, but at least he’s not covered in blood and guts. Eddie’s blood. Richie bites his lips to keep himself from screaming. “Turns out, when you spend your whole life hating yourself, it’s hard to take care of your body.”

“I hate you,” little Richie says, like that’s news to either of them. “Like, so much.”

Richie scoots a little closer. “I know. And I’d love to tell you that changes, but I’m not a very good liar. But do you know what?”

“What?”

“You have people who love you, even when you can’t do it yourself.” Richie looks out from their position and is deeply glad that he can’t see most of the carnage. The sounds are bad enough. “Eddie, he-”

Little Richie stands up, anger blazing in his eyes. “Eddie is dead! Don’t lie to me! It’s- he’s all over you. His- Eddie’s-”

Yeah, of course, Richie isn’t stupid and he’d make the connection. Fuck. Richie just wants to go over and hug the fuck out of that kid. “Hey, hey, shh. Calm down, kiddo. I… know it looks bad, and Eddie has a nasty tendency to be a heroic idiot at the worst possible moment, and it’s going to feel like your heart is being ripped to shreds, but I promise you that’s not how our story ends.”

“How can you say that? He’s dead!”

Richie feels bile and fury rise in his throat. “Yeah, he was!” He doesn’t mean to yell at the kid, but he’s still so angry about this. “He died! He died because we were stupid and reckless and he didn’t even know- he didn’t know we loved him.”

These last words are said quietly, and they bring tears to both their eyes. Richie continues. “He died, okay, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But I kept going, and I refused to give up on him, just like he would have done for me.”

Richie reaches out to his younger self, fingers softly touching the kid’s elbow. He’s leaving bloody prints, but right now he doesn’t care. “He loves you so much. I didn’t think I’d ever be lucky enough to have this, but now I do and it’s actually so much better than you ever imagined. I love him. I can say that now. I love Eddie.”

Little Richie looks at him, and there’s nothing of the fury left, just the fear that Richie has lived with all his life. “I’m scared,” he says, and he sounds so very young. “I can’t lose him.”

Richie smiles. “You won’t, not ever. If death can’t keep us apart, nothing will.”

The answering smile is a bright, cleansing light that takes Richie’s breath away.

+

Eddie is waiting.

After completing the circle, he briefly felt nauseous, but all six of his friends dropped to the floor, muscles twitching like dogs who are chasing cars in their dreams. He knows they’re on a quest, imagines it’s something like the beach, but hopefully with fewer of the murder crabs. Richie is whimpering and the sound is so horrible that Eddie pulls him into his lap.

He strokes Richie’s hair and hears a few soft murmurs of “Eddie, please, no”. He knows he can’t wake Richie, not until he’s found what he’s looking for, but this is tearing at his heart. Richie told him about the vision, before, what if this is more of the same?

“Shh, I’m here,” he says, pressing a soft kiss to Richie’s forehead. “I’m fine. You saved me.”

Slowly the others begin to stir, but Richie is still struggling.

“What’s g-going on?” Bill looks startled by his own voice.

Eddie keeps stroking Richie’s hair. “I think you all had to go through some kind of test to unlock your power,” Eddie says, thinking about magical girl cartoons and how this is totally the power up episode. “I hope you all found something, because we will need it.”

Eddie has a plan.

“I think we’re going to be fine,” Ben says. He’s flipping a heavy silver coin, once, twice. It comes up heads.

They are re-ordering the circle with Richie and Eddie in the middle, and that feels good, like they’re the focus for the power to channel through. And as cheesy as it sounds in his head, Eddie thinks: old magic, the power of love. What else could possibly work at this point, right?

Richie comes to with a gasp. “Holy shit,” he says and doesn’t make any move to get away from Eddie’s lap and his comforting fingers.

“Do you think you found what you were looking for?” Mike asks. There are tear tracks on Mike’s face, but he’s smiling softly.

Richie shudders, finally pushing himself up and away. Eddie’s not going to mention that the loss of contact leaves him bereft. It’s ridiculous. “I found something alright. After this, I think I’m going to need quite a bit of therapy.” He raises his hand and touches Eddie’s chest, where they both know a scar spreads across his skin. Richie’s hand glows and Eddie can feel a spark of electricity. “The tank is as full of magic as it’s going to get, I think.”

Alright. Everyone is looking at Eddie, now. Time to face the music.

+

If there are magic words that make this easier, Eddie doesn’t know them. He kneels across from Richie on the hotel lobby floor, a circle of five around them with fingers clasped tightly together, blood still idly dripping where they touch. Richie has a hand on Eddie’s chest and a grim smile on his face.

Eddie puts one hand on Richie’s arm to create a feedback loop of touch. Then he closes his eyes. He breathes heavily, can feel his heartbeat increasing with every moment, smells the uncertainty on his skin.

And then.

He lets it all go.

He lets the room fall away, lets everything fade except Richie and the circle. He can see them, even with his eyes closed. They are glowing like the sun.

Eddie can take their power: it’s given freely. They are holding it up for him to take into himself and destroy the chains that keep him locked to Derry. He feels how it all flows into him, forgiveness and strength, loyalty and compassion, patience and love. So much love.

Beyond the circle, there’s the shadow of a kid with a hoodie. _Adrian was here._

There’s the echo of Richie’s voice._ “But I think maybe if Derry is ever going to change, maybe someone has to stay around and remind it. You know, be its better angels and all that.”_

They say you can never go home again.

They are wrong.

Eddie tightens his grip on Richie’s arm and begins to speak. “Before I do this, I need to know something.”

Richie nods. “Yeah, sure, whatever you need.”

Eddie is not a very good liar, but he can try. “If this doesn’t work and I am stuck here forever, what are you going to do?”

Richie laughs. He can probably feel the magic running through them like high voltage electricity. He doesn’t believe it’s not going to work, and he wouldn’t be wrong, except… “Okay, right, on the off chance that you’re stuck here? I’d stay. All I want is to be with you, I don’t care if that’s New York, Chicago or Derry. Stop worrying so much, oh my god. It’s going to be fine.”

And Richie leans close, presses their foreheads together, and grins. “Together or not at all, remember?”

Eddie remembers.

The circle can give life. Eddie is already alive. This magic, this gift he’s being given, is far more than just a ticket out of Derry. He can do something good with it.

“I love you,” he whispers and kisses Richie.

The magic pulses in his veins, boiling hot and ice cold, a power so immense it nearly bursts through his skin. Eddie smiles. He gathers it all, concentrates the power in a shiny ball of light, and pushes it out into the world, out and up, all the way to Georgia, to beat the devil.

The light disappears from the circle and all Eddie has left is exhaustion. Before he collapses, he whispers, “I think someone needs to call Stan’s wife.”

+

This is what the turtle said.

_The circle can give life, you simply have to direct it._

And.

_Convince the beam that you will return when you are needed, and it will let you go._

They are, each of them, complete sentences.

+

When Eddie wakes up, he slowly becomes aware of three things.

There’s sunlight on his face and it’s just tipping over into uncomfortably warm, making his skin burn a little where it touches. His nose is itching and he wants to scratch it, but he can’t move his arms. He’s tucked under a blanket in one of the hotel rooms. There is something heavy on top of him.

The heavy thing is Richie, snoring softly and deeply asleep, his right arm and leg draped over Eddie’s body as if he’s afraid Eddie is going to float away in the night. All of this is both very sweet and bordering on making Eddie claustrophobic.

Then he notices Bev standing by the window, watching him with an unreadable expression. She looks like she’s angry, happy and sad at the same time, and Eddie doesn’t really have the capacity to deal with any of those emotions right now.

“Morning,” he croaks, his voice rough like sandpaper.

Bev raises an eyebrow. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

Eddie is surprised. He would have thought he’d slept longer. “Oh, that’s not so bad then.”

Bev shakes her head. “We did the ritual yesterday. You slept a little over twenty-seven hours.”

Oh.

“Sorry,” he says, sounding sheepish even to his own ears. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Scare us?” Bev says forcefully. “You didn’t want to scare us? Is that why you lied, why you didn’t tell us what a stupid thing you were going to do?” He can tell she’s trying not to raise her voice while still conveying how deeply disappointed she is with his conduct. Her hands are clenched into tight fists.

One of Eddie’s hands is in range of Richie’s skin and he starts stroking with his thumb to calm himself. It’s so easy to reach out and just touch Richie. Twenty seven years of denial, and for it to be this easy now, it’s a precious gift. He’d never give that up, not for anything. He looks at Bev and tries to make a contrite face without actually being all that sorry. “Did it work?”

She’s trying to remain stoic - Eddie can tell she’s still angry with him - but her eyes fill with tears and she gives him a watery smile as she nods. “Yeah,” she says, “it fucking worked. Stan is back.”

+

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell us,” Mike says as they’re all sitting around the dinner table.

Richie doesn’t care. All he cares about is that Eddie is okay. It stings a little that Eddie wouldn’t tell him what he was planning, but okay, there are extenuating circumstances and, frankly, Richie knows that he’s a terrible liar. It was probably good not to trust him with the truth.

Eddie sighs and Richie can feel it, because they’re pressed together from shoulder to thigh. Richie feels entirely justified in not letting Eddie out of his sight. “I needed you to believe that we could do it and let’s be real, it was easier to believe that you could fix me than Stan. And I wasn’t even sure I’d try until the very end. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

“You could have told me,” Richie says, burying his face in Eddie’s neck. He doesn’t need anyone else to hear how vulnerable he feels about this.

Eddie turns his head and pushes Richie so they can look at each other. “Hey, you know why I was afraid to tell you?”

Richie shakes his head.

Eddie’s putting his hand on Richie’s jaw and if they were alone, Richie would kiss him. “I couldn’t get your hopes up in case it didn’t work. And I couldn’t tell you something that would risk you sacrificing yourself, because if there is one thing that’s never going to happen, it’s me losing you.”

Richie kisses him. The others are just going to have to deal.

+

This is how Richie’s world begins.

He’s tangled up with Eddie on their hotel bed, listening to Eddie breathe. The others are here, somewhere, and down in Georgia, Stanley Uris is alive.

Richie never thought he could have any of this. For a long time, he didn’t even know he was missing something. It’s exhilarating and honestly a little scary. There’s still so much to take care of and figure out. Eddie thinks he can probably leave Derry for limited trips and he’s going to have to divorce his wife. Richie needs to figure out how to be a comedian in Maine. Bill might look for a property somewhere around Portland, like a writing retreat. Bev and Ben want to raise a family, but they’re probably going to start with a dog, see how it works out. And Mike is already packed up to leave in the morning, heading south to see Stan before he’ll discover the rest of the world.

“You’re thinking too damn loud,” Eddie says, his face mushed in a pillow.

Richie laughs. “Just thinking about what I want to do to your ass.”

“You’re an ass,” Eddie says, clearly not quite awake.

Richie kisses his shoulder, because he can. “Yeah, but I’m your ass.” The line is so bad that Eddie pops one eye open and glares at Richie, who can no longer fight the fucking giggle bubbling out of him. God, it’s so nice to be like this. He’s maybe a little hysteric, but that’s okay, because Eddie is grabbing a pillow and readying himself to beat Richie with it.

This is how Richie’s world begins. A pillow fight between two middle-aged assholes at three in the morning, and a whole lot of kissing.

He couldn’t ask for a better start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it! There's more in this universe that I'd like to explore at some point, because this is only the very start of their lives together, but for now, we've made it to the end. Let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about this fandom on twitter, I need more people to freak out about Richie and Eddie with. @realsuaine


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